Poems of James Russell Lowell.

by James Russell Lowell.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

In the year 1639 Percival Lowle, or Lowell, a merchant of Bristol, England, landed at the little seaport town of Newbury, Ma.s.s.

We generally speak of a man's descent. In the case of James Russell Lowell's ancestry it was rather an ascent through eight generations.

Percival Lowle's son, John Lowell, was a worthy cooper in old Newbury; his great-grandson was a shoemaker, his great-great-grandson was the Rev. John Lowell of Newburyport, the father of the Hon. John Lowell, who is regarded as the author of the clause in the Ma.s.sachusetts Const.i.tution abolishing slavery.

Judge Lowell's son, Charles, was a Unitarian minister, "learned, saintly, and discreet." He married Miss Harriet Traill Spence, of Portsmouth,--a woman of superior mind, of great wit, vivacity, and an impetuosity that reached eccentricity. She was of Keltic blood, of a family that came from the Orkneys, and claimed descent from the Sir Patrick Spens of "the grand old ballad." Several of her family were connected with the American navy. Her father was Keith Spence, purser of the frigate "Philadelphia," and a prisoner at Tripoli.

By ancestry on both sides, and by connections with the Russells and other distinguished families, Lowell was a good type of the New England gentleman.

He was born on the 22d of February, 1819, at Elmwood, not far from Brattle Street, Cambridge.

This three-storied colonial mansion of wood, was built in 1767 by Thomas Oliver, the last royal Lieutenant-Governor, before the Revolution.[1]

Like other houses in "Tory Row," it was abandoned by its owners. Soon afterwards it came into possession of Elbridge Gerry, Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, and fifth Vice-President of the United States, whose memory and name are kept alive by the term "_gerrymander_." It next became the property of Dr. Lowell about a year before the birth of his youngest child, and it was the home of the poet until his death.

[Footnote 1: Thomas Oliver was graduated from Harvard College in the cla.s.s of 1758. He was a gentleman of fortune, and lived first in Roxbury. He bought the property on Elmwood Avenue in 1766. When he accepted the royal commission of Lieutenant-Governor, he became President of the Council appointed by the King. On Sept. 2, 1774, about four thousand Middles.e.x freeholders a.s.sembled at Cambridge and compelled the mandamus councillors to resign. The President of the Council urged the propriety of delay, but the Committee would not spare him. He was forced to sign an agreement, "as a man of honor and a Christian, that he would never hereafter, upon any terms whatsoever, accept a seat at said Board on the present novel and oppressive form of government." He immediately quitted Cambridge; and when the British troops evacuated Boston he accompanied them. By an odd coincidence he went to reside at Bristol, England, where he died at the age of eighty-two years, in 1815, shortly before the Lowells, who were of Bristol origin, took possession of his former home. In Underwood's sketch of Lowell, Thomas Oliver is confused with Chief Justice Peter Oliver, a man of a very different type of character.]

Lowell's early education was obtained mainly at a school kept nearly opposite Elmwood by a retired publisher, an Englishman, Mr. William Wells. He also studied in the cla.s.sical school of Mr. Danial G. Ingraham in Boston. He was graduated from Harvard College in the cla.s.s of 1838.

He is reported as declaring that he read almost everything except the cla.s.s-books prescribed by the faculty. Lowell says, in one of his early poems referring to Harvard,--

"Tho' lightly prized the ribboned parchments three, Yet _collegisse juvat_, I am glad That here what colleging was mine I had."

He was secretary of the Hasty Pudding Society, and one of the editors of the college periodical _Harvardiana_, to which he contributed various articles in prose and verse. His neglect of prescribed studies, and disregard of college discipline, resulted in his rustication just before commencement in 1838. He was sent to Concord, where he resided in the family of Barzillai Frost, and made the acquaintance of Emerson, then beginning to rouse the ire of conservative Unitarianism by his transcendental philosophy, of the brilliant but overestimated Margaret Fuller, who afterwards severely criticised Lowell's verse, and of other well-known residents of the pretty town. He had been elected poet of his cla.s.s. His removal from college prevented him from delivering the poem which was afterwards published anonymously for private distribution. It contained a satire on abolitionists and reformers. "I know the village,"

he writes long afterwards in the person of Hosea Biglow, Esquire.

"I know the village though, was sent there once A-schoolin', 'cause to home I played the dunce!"

On his return to Cambridge he took up the study of law, and, in 1840, received the degree of LL.B. He even went so far as to open an office in Boston; but it is a question whether there was any actual basis of fact in a whimsical sketch of his ent.i.tled "My First Client," published in the short-lived _Boston Miscellany_, edited by Nathan Hale.

Several things engrossed Lowell's attention to the exclusion of law.

Society at Cambridge was particularly attractive at that time. Allston the painter was living at Cambridgeport. Judge Story's pleasant home was on Brattle Street. The Fays then occupied the house which has since become the seat of Radcliffe College. Longfellow, described as "a slender, blond young professor," was established in the Craigie House.

The famous names of Dr. Palfrey, Professor Andrews Norton, father of Lowell's friend and biographer, the "saintly" Henry Ware, and others will occur to the reader. He was fond of walking and knew every inch of the beautiful ground then called "Sweet Auburn," now turned by the hand of misguided man into that most distressing of monstrosities--a modern cemetery. He haunted the poetic shades of the Waverley Oaks, heard the charming music of Beaver Brook, and climbed the hills of Belmont and Arlington.

He himself took his turn in establishing a magazine. In January, 1843, he started _The Pioneer_, to which Hawthorne, John Neal, Miss Barrett, Poe, Whittier, Story, Parsons, and others contributed, and which, in spite of such an array of talent, perished untimely during the winds of March.

He had already published, in 1841, a little volume of poems ent.i.tled "A Year's Life." They were marked by no great originality, betrayed little promise of future eminence, and Margaret Fuller, who reviewed them, was quite right in a.s.serting that "neither the imagery nor the music of Lowell's verses was his own." The first sonnet in the present volume (page 1) practically acknowledges the force of this criticism. The influence of Wordsworth and Tennyson may be distinctly traced in most of them. But many of the lines were harsh and many of the rhymes were careless. Lowell's later and correcter taste omitted most of them from his collected works.

Not far from Elmwood, but in the adjoining village of Watertown, lived one of Lowell's cla.s.smates, whose sister, Maria White, a slender, delicate girl, with a poetic genius in some respects more regulated and lofty than his own, early inspired him with a true and saving love.

Speaking of the influences that moulded his life, George William Curtis says:--

"The first and most enduring was an early and happy pa.s.sion for a lovely and high-minded woman who became his wife--the Egeria who exalted his youth and confirmed his n.o.blest aspirations; a heaven-eyed counsellor of the serener air, who filled his mind with peace and his life with joy."

The young lady's prudent father objected to the marriage until the newly fledged lawyer should be in a position to support a wife.

Shortly after the shipwreck of _The Pioneer_, Lowell was offered a hundred dollars by _Graham's Monthly_ for ten poems. When Pegasus is able to earn such princely sums, there seems no reason why Love should be kept waiting at the cottage door. In 1844 Lowell published a new edition of his poems, and married Miss White. It was her influence that decided him to cast in his lot with the abolitionists. It was her refined taste that shaped and tempered his impetuous verse. A volume of her poems was in 1855, in an edition of fifty copies, privately printed, and is now very rare. It is an odd circ.u.mstance that in Lowell's library, from which Harvard College was allowed to select any volumes not in Gore Hall, neither this book nor any of Lowell's own early poems was to be found.

The young couple took up their residence at Elmwood, and here were born three daughters and a son. All but one of his children died in infancy.

Many of the tenderest of his poems refer with touching pathos to his bereavement: such for instance are "The Changeling" and "The First Snowfall."

In 1845 appeared "The Vision of Sir Launfal,"--a genuine inspiration composed in two days in a sort of ecstasy of poetic fervor. That more than anything established his fame. He recognized that he was dedicated to the Muses.

In 1846 he wrote:--

"If I have any vocation, it is the making of verse. When I take my pen for that, the world opens itself ungrudgingly before me; everything seems clear and easy, as it seems sinking to the bottom could be as one leans over the edge of his boat in one of those dear coves at Fresh Pond.... My true place is to serve the cause as a poet. Then my heart leaps before me into the conflict."

The same year he began his "Biglow Papers" in the Boston _Courier_. Such _jeux d'esprit_ are apt to be ephemeral. Lowell's are immortal. They preserved in literary form a fast-fading dialect; they caught and embalmed the mighty issues of a tremendous world-problem. Their influence was incalculable. He gathered them into a volume in 1848, and became corresponding editor of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_. Fortunate man who throws himself into an unpopular cause which is in harmony with the Right! How different from Wordsworth who attacked the ballot and took sides against reform!

Lowell's penchant for satire was exemplified again the same year in his "Fable for Critics."

In this Lowell with no sparing hand laid on his portraits most droll and amusing colors. It is a comic portrait gallery, a series of caricatures whose greatest value (as in all good caricatures) lies in the accurate presentation of characteristic features. He did not spare himself:--

"There is Lowell, who's striving Parna.s.sus to climb With a whole bale of _isms_ tied together with rhyme.

He might get on alone, spite of troubles and bowlders, But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders.

The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching Till he learns the distinctions 'twixt singing and preaching; His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well, But he'd rather by half make a drum of the sh.e.l.l, And rattle away till he's old as Methusalem At the head of a march to the last New Jerusalem."

Some of his thrusts left embittered feelings, but in general the tone was so good-natured that only the thin-skinned could object, and it must be confessed many of his judgments have been confirmed by Time.

In 1851 Lowell visited Europe, and spent upwards of a year widening his acquaintance with the polite languages. But it is remarkable that Lowell gave the world almost no metrical translations. Shortly after his return his wife died (Oct. 27, 1853) after a slow decline. In reference to this bereavement Longfellow wrote his beautiful poem, "The Two Angels."

The following year Longfellow resigned the Smith Professorship of the French and Spanish Languages and Literature and Belles Lettres, and Lowell was appointed his successor with two years' leave of absence. He had won his spurs. He had collected his poems in two volumes, not including "A Year's Life," the "Biglow Papers," or the "Fable for Critics." He was known as one of the most brilliant contributors to _Putnam's Monthly_ and other magazines.

In 1854 he delivered a series of twelve lectures on English poetry before the Lowell Inst.i.tute. Ten years before he had published a volume of "Conversations on the Poets." The contrast between the two works is no less p.r.o.nounced than that between his earlier and later poems.

In both, however, there is a tendency toward a confusing over-elaboration--Metaphors trample on the heels of Similes, and quaint and often grotesque conceits sometimes pall upon the taste, just as in the poems a flash of incongruous wit sometimes disturbs the serenity that is desirable.

On his return from Europe, Mr. Lowell occupied the chair which he adorned by his brilliant attainments and made memorable by his fame. He lectured on Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Cervantes, and delighted his audiences. At the same time he was editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_ for several years. From 1863 until 1872 he was a.s.sociated with Professor Charles Eliot Norton in the conduct of the _North American Review_.

In 1857 he married Miss Frances Dunlap of Portland, Me., a cultivated lady who had been the governess of his daughter. She had unerring literary taste and sound judgment, and Mr. Lowell soon came to entrust to her the management of his financial affairs. She was enabled to make their comparatively small income more than meet the exigencies of an exacting position.

The second series of the "Biglow Papers," relating to the War of the Rebellion, were first published in the _Atlantic_. They were collected into a volume in 1865. That year was rendered notable by his "Commemoration Ode," the worthy crowning of one of the grandest poetic opportunities ever granted to man. "Under the Willows" appeared in 1869; "The Cathedral" in 1870.

In 1864 he had issued a collection of his early descriptive articles under the t.i.tle, "Fireside Travels." In 1870 came "Among my Books." The second series followed in 1876. "My Study Windows" was published in 1871. All these prose works were marked by an exuberant, vivid, poetic, impa.s.sioned style. The tropical efflorescence of imagery was characteristic of them all. He ought to have remembered his own words,--

"Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose."

In 1876 appeared three memorial poems: that read at Concord, April 19, 1875; that read at Cambridge under the Washington Elm, July 3, 1875; and the Fourth of July Ode of 1876. This year Mr. Lowell was appointed one of the presidential electors; and the following year President Hayes first offered him the Austrian mission, and, on his refusal of that, gave him the honorary post at Madrid, which had been adorned by Everett, Irving, and Prescott. He was there three years, and, on the retirement of Mr. Welsh in 1880, was transferred to the Court of St. James, or, as one of the English papers expressed it, he became "His Excellency the Amba.s.sador of American Literature to the Court of Shakespeare."

He was extremely popular. Known in private as "one of the most marvellous of story-tellers," he became the lion of many public occasions. The _London News_ spoke of the "Extraordinary felicity of his occasional speeches." At Birmingham he delivered a n.o.ble address on Democracy. He was selected to deliver the oration at the dedication of the Dean Stanley Memorial. He spoke on Fielding at Taunton, on Coleridge at Westminster Abbey, on Gray at Cambridge. He was President of the Wordsworth Society. All sorts of honors were heaped upon him, both at home and abroad.

He returned to America in 1885, and once more occupied the somewhat dilapidated historic mansion at Elmwood. Once more he moved amid his rare and precious books, and heard the birds singing in the elms that his father had planted, or in the cl.u.s.tered bushes back of the house. He took a deep interest in the struggle for international copyright. He was President of the American Copyright League, and wrote the memorable lines:--