Lowell Same Fressell 1819 1891 AMC[james russell lowell[1,1017,2,3,3,3,4,6,5,100,6,110 (13-1) Page 1 of 1 Records 13 through 13 of 256 returned. Author: Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891. Title: Additional papers, 1736-1951. Description: 6 boxes (3 linear ft.) Notes: Lowell was an author, poet, editor, teacher, and diplomat. He edited the Atlantic Monthly (1857-1861), and with Charles Eliot Norton, the North American Review (1864- ) i was professor of French and Spanish Languages and Literatures at Harvard (1855-1886) succeeding Longfellow; and U.S. minister to Spain (1877-1880), and to England (1880-1885) Primarily personal and professional letters to Lowell. There is correspondence between Lowell and his family, including correspondence with his daughter Mabel Lowell Burnett and his father Charles Lowell. Additionally, there are autograph drafts of poems, unidentified compositions, genealogies of the Cutts, Lowell, and Russell families, photographs, and printed materials, among other items. Gift of Mrs. Esther Lowell Cunningham, 1948. Electronic finding aid available http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCl. Hough: :hou00401 Unpublished printed finding aid available in the Houghton Accessions Records, 1947-1948, under *47M-347. James Russell Lowell Additional Papers (MS Am 1484.1). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Subjects: Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891. Cutts family. Lowell family. Russell family. American poetry - - 19th century. Genealogies. aat Photographs. aat Poems. aat Other authors: Burnett, Mabel Lowell, 1847-1898, correspondent. Cutts family. Lowell, Charles, 1782-1861, correspondent. Lowell family. Russell family. Location: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. Control No. : MAHV03-A380 Tagged display | Previous Record | Next Record | Brief Record Display New Search This display was generated by the CNIDR Web-Z39.50 gateway, version 1.08, with Library of Congress Modifications. http://www.loc.gov/cgi-bin/zgate?pr.../rlinamc3.html,zinc.rlg.org,200%26AUTH%3drlinam 8/24/2004 AMC[james russelllowell[1,1017,2,3,3,3,4,6,5,100,6,1]] (10-1) Page 1 of 1 7/13/1941 Check No Add- Hair. Records 10 through 10 of 253 returned. Author: Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891. Title: Additional papers, 1736-1951. Description: 6 boxes (3 linear ft.) Notes: Lowell was an author, poet, editor, teacher, and diplomat. He edited the Atlantic Monthly (1857-1861), and with Charles Eliot Norton, the North American Review (1864- ) ; was professor of French and Spanish Languages and Literatures at Harvard (1855-1886) succeeding Longfellow; and U.S. minister to Spain (1877-1880), and to England (1880-1885) Primarily personal and professional letters to Lowell. There is correspondence between Lowell and his family, including correspondence with his daughter Mabel Lowell Burnett and his father Charles Lowell. Additionally, there are autograph drafts of poems, unidentified compositions, genealogies of the Cutts, Lowell, and Russell families, photographs, and printed materials, among other items. Gift of Mrs. Esther Lowell Cunningham, 1948. Electronic finding aid available http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:Fhcl.Hough:hou00401, Unpublished printed finding aid available in the Houghton Accessions Records, 1947-1948, under *47M-347. James Russell Lowell Additional Papers (MS Am is85 1484.1). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Subjects: Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891. Cutts family. Lowell family. Some Russell family. American poetry -- 19th century. Genealogies. aat Photographs. aat Poems. aat Other authors: Burnett, Mabel Lowell, 1847-1898, correspondent. Cutts family. Lowell, Charles, 1782-1861, correspondent. Lowell family. Russell family. Location: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. Control No. : MAHV03-A380 Tagged display | Previous Record | Next Record I Brief Record Display | New Search This display was generated by the CNIDR Web-Z39.50 gateway, version 1.08, with Library of Congress Modifications. ehttp://lcweb.loc.gov/cgi-bin/zgate?pres.../rlinamc3.html,zinc.rlg.org,200%26AUTH%3drlinam 7/6/2004 AMC[james russell 1lowell[1,1017,2,3,3,3,4,6,5,100,6,1]] (20-1) Page 1 of 1 Records 20 through 20 of 253 returned. Author: Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891. Title: Papers, 1855-1890 [manuscript] Description: 51 items. Local Call No: Sec. A Notes: Poet and lecturer, of Cambridge (Middlesex Co.), Mass. Letters by Lowell, commenting on his lectures, a trip to Europe, desire for the appointment of one Cutler to the Harvard faculty, the difficulty of writing a poem for a special occasion, qualifications of Tom Talbot, illness, a falsehood told on Phillips Brooks, Hoar's ability as a toastmaster, and regrets that invitations cannot be accepted. There are also poems by Lowell; a social note by his wife, Frances D. Lowell, to Mrs. T. M. Wheeler; a poem of his aunt, Anna Cabot Lowell, a parody on an ode by Southey; a leaflet of the American Copyright League of which Lowell was president; and two calling cards. Subjects: Brooks, Phillips, 1835-1893. Lowell, Anna C. (Anna Cabot), 1811-1874. Lowell, Frances Dunlap, d. 1885. American Copyright League (New York, N.Y.) Poets, American -- Correspondence. Poets, American -- 19th century. Europe -- Description and travel. Control No. NCDGADJ7117-A Tagged display | Previous Record I Next Record I Brief Record Display | New Search This display was generated by the CNIDR Web-Z39.50 gateway, version 1.08, with Library of Congress Modifications. http://lcweb.loc.gov/cgi-bin/zgate?pres.../rlinamc3.html,zinc.rlg.org,200%26AUTH%3drlinam 7/6/2004 AMC[james russelllowell[1,1017,2,3,3,3,4,6,5,100,6,1]] (5-1) Page 1 of 2 Records 5 through 5 of 253 returned. Author: Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891. Title: James Russell Lowell collection of papers, 1841-1903 bulk (1841-1893) . Description: 358 items. Notes: James Russell Lowell was an American poet, critic, satirist, essayist, and diplomat. He was appointed United States ambassador to the Spanish court in 1877 and then to the Court of St. James in England from 1880-1885. This is a synthetic collection consisting of manuscripts, a typescript, correspondence by and about the author, and financial documents. The manuscript material includes holograph poems, articles, and essays, as well as manuscript poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Edward Waldo Emerson's hand, and a review by Bret Harte in Harte's hand. The correspondence includes letters, dating from 1841 to 1890, from the author to Charles Frederick Briggs, Robert Carter, Eliza Callahan Cleveland, James T. Fields, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Francis Heath, Sir Frederick Locker-Lampson, Julia Prinsep Jackson Stephen, Sir Leslie Stephen, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bayard Taylor, George Ticknor, Francis H. Underwood, Mary Augusta Arnold Ward, John Greenleaf Whittier, and others. The correspondence also includes letters relating to the author, dating from 1875 to 1903, between various correspondents including George Granville Bradley, Sir Leslie Stephen, Mabel Lowell Burnett, Julia Prinsep Jackson Stephen, George H. Duckworth, Edward Waldo Emerson, Charles Eliot Norton, Sir Edmund William Gosse, O. W. Holmes, Henry James, and others. This is a synthetic collection, created from materials acquired through gift and purchase from various sources. The bulk of the materials were previously owned by W. T. H. Howe and Owen D. Young. Other materials were previously owned by William Deming, George S. Hellman, and Joan Howe. The holograph copy of "My Brook" was presented by the author to Dr. M. J. Savage, later given by Dr. Savage to his daughter Mrs. Minot Simms. Inventory list and card catalog available in repository. Subjects: Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891. Other authors: Bradley, George Granville, 1821-1903. Briggs, Charles Frederick, 1804-1877. Burnett, Mabel Lowell. Carter, Robert, 1807-1889. Cleveland, Eliza Callahan. Duckworth, George Herbert. Emerson, Edward Waldo, 1844-1930. Fields, James Thomas, 1817-1881. Gosse, Edmund, 1849-1928. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864. Heath, John Francis. hhttp://lcweb.loc.gov/cgi-bin/zgate?pres.../rlinamc3.html,zinc.rlg.org,200%26AUTH%3drlinam 7/6/2004 AMC[james russell lowell[1,1017,2,3,3,3,4,6,5,100,6,1]] (8-1) Page 1 of 2 Records 8 through 8 of 253 returned. Author: Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891. Title: Additional papers, 1767-1898. Description: 4 boxes (2 linear ft.) Notes: Lowell was an author, poet, editor, teacher, and diplomat. He edited The Atlantic Monthly (1857-1861), and with Charles Eliot Norton, The North American Review (1864- ) ; was professor of French and Spanish Lanugages and Literatures at Harvard (1855-1886) succeeding Longfellow; and U.S. minister to Spain (1877-1880) and to England (1880-1885) Collection contains correspondence, the bulk to Lowell from other authors, friends, and European acquaintances, especially during his diplomatic service and last years. Other letters are by Lowell, mostly to members of his family, or are between his relatives and third parties. Lowell's compositions consist of poems, some never published, and prose, some in Spanish. Also includes notebooks of poems, social engagements, and finances; and some photographs, programs, invitations, menus, and clippings. Deposited by Dr. Francis Lowell Burnett, 1962. Material in English and Spanish. Electronic finding aid available http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHcl. Hough:hou00941 Unpublished printed finding aid available in the Houghton Accessions Records, 1961-1962, under *61M-249. James Russell Lowell Additional Papers (MS Am 1659). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Subjects: Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891. American poetry -- 18th century. American poetry -- 19th century. Agendas. aat Clippings. aat Family papers. aat Financial records. aat Invitations. aat Menus. aat Photographs. aat Poems. aat Diplomats. lcsh Other authors: Lowell family. Location: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. Control No. : MAHV03-A382 Tagged display | Previous Record | Next Record Brief Record Display I New Search This display was generated by the CNIDR Web-Z39.50 gateway, version 1.08, with Library of Congress Modifications. http://lcweb.loc.gov/cgi-bin/zgate?pres.../rlinamc3.html,zinc.rlg.org,200%26AUTH%3drlinam 7/6/2004 PAL:James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) Page 1 of 4 PAL: Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide An Ongoing Online Project © Paul P. Reuben Chapter 3: Early Nineteenth Century: James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) Outside Links: I JRL in Cornell's Making of America I JRL: Selected Works I Page Links: I Primary Works I Selected Bibliography: Books I Selected Bibliography: Articles I MLA Style Citation of this Web Page I Site Links: I Chap 3: Index I Alphabetical List I Table Of Contents I Home Page I (Photo source: James Russell Lowell) I Top I Primary Works A Year's Life and the Other Poems, 1841; "The Present Crisis," Poems, 1844; Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 1845; Poems, 1848; "Fable for Critics," 1848; The Biglow Papers, 1848, (poems, second series, 1867); "Vision of Sir Launfal," 1848 (e-text); "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemorations," 1865 (devoted to Abraham Lincoln); "The Cathedral," 1870 (long poem); My Study Windows, 1871 (essays); Among My Books, 1870, 1876 (literary criticism). Editor, The Pioneer, a short-lived journal published in Boston. First Editor, Atlantic Monthly http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap3/lowell.html 4/15/2003 PAL:James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) Page 2 of 4 The complete writings of James Russell Lowell. 16 vols. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1904. PS2300 .F04 The complete poetical works of James Russell Lowell. Ed. Horace E. Scudder. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924. PS2305 .A1 The Pioneer. A literary magazine. Ed. James Russell Lowell. With an introd. by Sculley Bradley. NY: Scholars' Facsims. & Reprints, 1947. AP2 .P592 Literary criticism of James Russell Lowell. Ed. Herbert F. Smith. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1969. PS2315 S6 The English poets: Lessing, Rousseau; essays. With "An apology for a preface." Port Washington, NY: Kennikat P, 1970. PS2322 E5 James Russell Lowell's The Biglow papers, first series. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1977. PS2306 .A1 I Top I Selected Bibliography: Books Beatty, Richmond C. James Russell Lowell. Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1969. PS2331 B4 Duberman, Martin B. James Russell Lowell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. PS2331 D8 Hale, Edward E. James Russell Lowell and his friends. NY: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899. PS2331 .H3 Heymann, C. David. American aristocracy: the lives and times of James Russell, Amy, and Robert Lowell. NY: Dodd, Mead, 1980. PS129 .H44 Howard, Leon. Victorian knight-errant; a study of the early literary career of James Russell Lowell. Berkeley: U of California P, 1952. PS2331 .H6 McGlinchee, Claire. James Russell Lowell. NY: Twayne, 1967. PS2331 .M3 Pollak, Gustav. International perspective in criticism. Goethe, Grillparzer, Sainte-Beuve, Lowell. Port Wahsington, NY: Kennikat P, 1965 (1914). PN92 .P6 Scudder, Horace E. James Russell Lowell: a biography. 2 vols. NY: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901. PS2331 S4 Wagenknecht, Edward. James Russell Lowell; portrait of a many-sided man. NY: Oxford UP, 1971. PS2331 .W3 I Top I Selected Bibliography: Articles Anderson, John Q. "Lowell's 'The Washers of the Shroud' and the Celtic Legend of the Washer of the Ford." American Literature 35 (1963): 361-363. Attebery, Brian. "The Empty Cathedral: Lowell and Adams." Markham Review 9 (1980): 29-33. http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap3/lowell.html 4/15/2003 PAL:James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) Page 3 of 4 Bell, Michael J. "'The Only True Folk Songs We Have in English': James Russell Lowell and the Politics of the Nation." Journal of American Folklore 108.428 (Sprg 1995): 131-55. Brodie, Edward H., Jr. "Lowell's Biglow Papers: No. 1." Explicator 42.4 (1984): 21-23. Cameron, Kenneth W. Lowell, Whittier, Very and the Alcotts among Their Contemporaries: A Harvest of Estimates, Insights and Anecdotes from the Victorian Literary World and an Index. Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1978. Cary, Richard. "Lowell to Cabot." Colby Library Quarterly 6 (1963): 208-15. Clements, Frances M. "Public and Private Reactions to Lowell's Fable for Critics." American Transcendental Quarterly 43 (Sumr 1979): 189-98. Duberman, Martin B. "Twenty-Seven Poems by James Russell Lowell." American Literature 35 (1963): 322-51. Hudson, Gertrude R. ed. Browning to His American Friends: Letters between the Brownings, the Storys and James Russell Lowell, 1841-90. NY: Barnes & Noble, 1965. Kenney, Alice P. "Yankees in Camelot: The Democratization of Chivalry in James Russell Lowell, Mark Twain and Edwin Arlington Robinson." Studies in Medievalism 1.2 (Sprg 1982): 73-78. MacDonnell, Kevin B. A Descriptive Catalogue of the James Russell Lowell Collection. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1992. McWilliams, John. "James Russell Lowell on Cooper: Forgotten Tributes." James Fenimore Cooper Society Newsletter 9.3 (Nov 1998): 3-4. Monteiro, George. "Howells on Lowell: An Unascribed Review." New England Quarterly 38 (1965): 508-09. Mott, Wesley. "Thoreau and Lowell on 'Vacation': The Maine Woods and 'A Moosehead Journal'." Thoreau Journal Quarterly 10.3 (1978): 14-24. Oggel, L. Terry. "Lowell's Humor and His Other Review of Thoreau." American Transcendental Quarterly 41 (1979): 45-60. Rees, Robert A. "James Russell Lowell." Fifteen American Authors before 1900: Bibliographical Essays on Research and Criticism. Eds. Earl N. Harbert and Robert A. Rees. Madison : U of Wisconsin P, 1984. 379-401. Tanselle, G. Thomas. "The Craftsmanship of Lowell: Revisions in The Cathedral.' Bulletin of the New York Public Library 70 (1966): 50-63. Tate, Thomas K. "James Russell Lowell's Nephews." New England Quarterly 64.1 (Mar 1991): 127-29. Tucker, Edward. "James Russell Lowell and Robert Carter: The Pioneer and Fifty Letters from Lowell to Carter." Studies in the American Renaissance (1987): 187-246. http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap3/lowell.html 4/15/2003 PAL:James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) Page 4 of 4 Wortham, Thomas. "James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man." The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism. Ed. Joel Myerson. NY: Mod. Lang. Assn. of America, 1984. 336-42. MLA Style Citation of this Web Page: Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 3: Early Nineteenth Century - James Russell Lowell." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. www URL: http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap3/lowell.html(provide page date or date of your login). I Top I Chap 3: Index I Alphabetical List I Table Of Contents I Home Page I January 5, 2003 I } http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap3/lowell.html 4/15/2003 James Russell Lowell Page 1 of 2 James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) is one of the group of authors sometimes called the Fireside Poets or the Schoolroom Poets, a group which also included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Because of their conservative approach to verse and the often blatant morality in their poetry, the very qualities that made them popular in their day, they have been out of favor throughout much of the twentieth century. Nevertheless members of the group like Lowell and Whittier, both ardent abolitionists, may not have seemed SO conservative in the nineteenth century. Lowell's contribution to Arthurian literature is his poem "The Vision of Sir Launfal." First published in 1848, "The Vision of Sir Launfal" tells the story of Launfal, who is initially a haughty nobleman. The night before he is to begin a quest for the Holy Grail he has a dream vision in which he sets out on the quest. His first act is to toss a gold piece scornfully to a beggar. When he returns in the winter he has been chastened by his own suffering on the quest and shares his crust of bread with the beggar in a true spirit of charity and brings him a drink from a stream in a wooden cup. The beggar is transformed into Christ and the bread and wine into his body and blood. The wooden cup is the Grail that Launfal has sought. Having learned his lesson, he opens his hall and shares his bounty with anyone who wishes it. Lowell's poem is particularly interesting as a democratization of the Grail story. Important in this regard is the "Author's Note" prefatory to the poem. In this note, Lowell says that he opens the Grail quest to others besides Arthur's knights and places it in a time other than that of Arthur's reign. This seems strange since Launfal is one of Arthur's knights in several medieval sources and since there is nothing in the poem that dates it to a time other than Arthur's reign. Thus Lowell deliberately creates a non-Arthurian Arthurian poem in order to suggest that his vision of the Grail as true charity is something that any person in any time can achieve. "The Vision of Sir Launfal" achieved tremendous popularity. It was often used as a school text; and there was a new edition or a reprint of an earlier edition virtually every year from its first publication in 1848 until after the turn of the century. It is one of the key texts in the American Arthurian tradition. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/auth/lowell.htm 4/15/2003 FirstSearch: Detailed Record Page 1 of 2 Detailed Record Terms & Conditions OC © 1992-2003 OCLC LC Click on a checkbox to mark a record to be e-mailed or printed in Marked WorldCat Records. im ? WorldCat results for: ti: lowell and ti: james Subjects Libraries E-mail Print Export Help and ti: russell. Record 56 of 508. 56 Mark: Prev Next James Russell Lowell letters and photographs, James Russell Lowell; Matthew Arnold; Dawson W Turner; Thomas Niles; Richard Watson Gilder; Edward John Phelps; Edmund Clarence Stedman; Mathew B Brady 1845-1887 English Archival Material 20 items. The collection consists of fifteen letters, a report, an autograph, and three photographs. Recipients include Matthew Arnold, E.C. Appleton, Dawson Turner, Lorenz Rohr, E.J. Phelps, R.W. Gilder, Thomas Niles, Penington and son, and E.C. Stedman. Topics include Sir Isaac Newton, Jean Ingelow, a book order, Walt Whitman, the Charles River Bridge, and various invitations GET THIS ITEM Availability: Check the catalogs in your library. Libraries worldwide that own item: 1 FIND RELATED More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author I Advanced options Find Items About: Lowell, James Russell, (max: 460); Arnold, Matthew, (max: 1,272); Niles, Thomas, (max: 4); Gilder, Richard Watson, (max: 65); Phelps, Edward John, (max: 6); Stedman, Edmund Clarence, (max: 65); Brady, Mathew B., (max: 110) Title: James Russell Lowell letters and photographs, 1845-1887. Author(s): Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891. ; Arnold, Matthew, 1822-1888, ; recipient.; Turner, Dawson W.; 1815-1885, ; (Dawson William),; recipient.; Niles, Thomas,; 1825-1894, ; recipient.; Gilder, Richard Watson,; 1844- 1909, ; recipient.; Phelps, Edward John,; 1822-1900, ; recipient. Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 1833-1908, ; recipient.; Brady, Mathew B. 1823 (ca.)- 1896, ; photographer. Corp Author(s): John Penington & Son, ; recipient. Year: 1845-1887 Description: 20 items. In: Allison-Shelley manuscript collection Language: English Abstract: The collection consists of fifteen letters, a report, an autograph, and three photographs. Recipients include Matthew Arnold, E.C. Appleton, Dawson Turner, Lorenz Rohr, E.J. Phelps, R.W. Gilder, Thomas Niles, Penington and son, and E.C. Stedman. Topics include Sir Isaac Newton, Jean http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FSFETCH?fetchtype=fullrecord:sessionid=sp02 numrecs= 4/15/2003 FirstSearch: Detailed Record Page 2 of 2 Ingelow, a book order, Walt Whitman, the Charles River Bridge, and various invitations. Also includes a report of a meeting discussing slavery, and three photographs of Lowell, including one by Mathew Brady. SUBJECT(S) Descriptor: Intellectuals -- New England -- Correspondence. Antislavery movements -- Massachusetts -- Boston. Named Person: Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891 -- Correspondence. Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891 -- Portraits. Ingelow, Jean, 1820-1897. Newton, Isaac, Sir, 1642-1727. Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892. Genre/Form: Letters. Photographs. Geographic: Charles River Bridge (Mass.) Note(s): In Rare Books and Manuscripts, University Libraries, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA (1984-0053R/A-S/VF Lit)./ Bio/History: Versatile and influential, James Russell Lowell was the preeminent American man of letters of his day. Poet, critic, intellectual, academic, Harvard professor, diplomat, and Ambassador to England, Lowell was a prolific writer and astute observer. His love for America and New England and his contributions to a national literature are indelible. General Info: Unrestricted access. Entry: 20020624 Update: 20030311 Document Type: Archival Material Accession No: OCLC: 50045997 Database: WorldCat ? WorldCat results for: ti: lowell and ti: james Subjects Libraries E-mail Print Export Help and ti: russell. Record 56 of 508. http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FSFETCH?fetchtype=fullrecord:sessionid=sp02...:numrecs= 4/15/2003 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL Page 1 of 12 #110 NIC Google™ Search CYCLOPEDIA O Web O www.1911encyclopedia JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL Ads by Google LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL (1819-1891), American author and diplomatist, was horn. at Elmwood, in. Free Poetry Contest Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 22nd of February Send Your Poem Here and 1819, the son of Charles Lowell(I7821861). i On his Win Submit Your Poem mothers side he was descended from the Spences Here! (aff) and Traills, who made their home in the Orkney aftrk.com/e/poetry/signup.cgi?Affil Islands, his great-grandfather, Robert Trail, returning to England on the breaking out of hostilities in 1775. He was brought up in a neighborhood bordering on. Poetry Contest - $10,000 the open country, and from his earliest years he Enter Your Poem - Win found a companion in nature; he was also early $10,000! Enter Now To initiated into the reading of poetry and romance, Win. (aff) hearing Spenser and Scott in childhood, and aftrk.com/e/Poetry introduced to old ballads by his mother. He had for schoolmaster an Englishman who held by the traditions of English schools, so that before he entered Harvard College he had a more familiar Free Poetry Contest FamousPoets.com acquaintance with Latin verse than most of his $50,000 Awarded. (affil) fellowsa familiarity which showed itself later in his aftrk.com/e/poetry/signup.cgi mock-pedantic accompaniment to The Biglow Papers and his macaronic poetry. He was a wide reader, but a somewhat indifferent student, graduating at Harvard without special honors ifl 1838. During his college Poetry Contest course he wrote a number of trivial pieces for a Do you have that poem, college magazine, and shortly after graduating printed limerick or haiku that could for private circulation the poem which his class asked win $ 10000? Aff www.poetry.com him to write for their graduation festivities. He was uncertain at first what vocation to choose, and vacillated between business, the ministry, medicine and law. He decided at last to practise law, Post Poems and after a course at the Harvard law school, was Publish for Free PoetryPoem.com admitted to the bar. While studying for his profession, however, he contributed poems and prose articles to various magazines. He cared little for the law, regarding it simply as a distasteful means of livelihood, yet his experiments in writing did not http://25.191lencyclopedia.org/L/LO/LOWELL_JAMES_RUSSELL.htmp 7/6/2004 Scudder.' JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.: The Authorized Biography in Two Volumes By Mr. New ELISABETH York Times LUTHER (1857-1922): Newspapers: CARY Nov The 16. New 1901; York Times (1851-2007) Historical JAMES pg. BRI ProQuest RUSSELL LOWELL. The Authorized Biography in Two Volumes By Mr. Scudder.' HOWELLS, in his Personal did Retro- not, R. said of Mr. Lowell: He but M indeed. spect," make one impression upon me, should thousand impressions. which I pre- a seck in vain to embody in a single many sentment." impressions of Mr. Lowell, his letters. and Already the public also has gained had SO through personal personal works. through friends, that his intensely the abundant reminiscence of his a space has through difficult to realize how entirely empty this more formal it is left for Mr. Scudder to fill with seen Mr. Lowell been We have never yet quite nearer to it in biography. Nor do we now. But we come on which to whole. such a body of connected data him surrounded build our environment and developing in orderly his somewhat having conception of him. We see sequence by his events in sequence as orderly as willfulness and -at all tendencies permitted from the product of his vagrant his early years to the splendid himself with sin- ardor of Mr. Scudder has contented and no subject maturity. little comment and explanation, has followed the of gularly biography ever needed less. but the he apparent workings course of mind Lowell's so minutely interests as and to bring his many-sided of his into essential harmony of Low- personality first volume the inevitable impression than mitigated. ell's perverse inveterate hero-worshipper could Rather flighty In the youth is deepened rather hardly find him other youthful he was in reader must The most than a decidedly trying boy. his own opinion, and exceedingly after, and. the unprejudiced a letter expressed long inconsiderate. Mr. Sendder prints former was add, blithely to his son. written as the colle- from Dr. Lowell for Europe, leaving Lowell a life young of inde- about to sail well adapted to leading suggested a is not gian not very The financial arrangement and shows pendence. complimentary in its implication, one who in his own wholly was needed for dose of how early came the spur into the world with a strong words writes the poppy You in his and know veins." you the know necessity that of 1 afford shall economy." never you pleasure. deny you If I father, but from necessity to what pay will you half a dollar the a week. Phi Beta shall direct one Charles of the first eight admitted as you are to admitted. some- If you Kappa. are $1.00 per week will as allow soon it I shall the buy first you five in I find abroad. my finances If you graduate one on your of graduation. $50. If your thing class I shall give ST5. you If $100 one of the first do twelve. not miss one of the first second ten. scholar. $200. shall If you have Bryant's is If the exercises first or unexcused of you equal value. unless it you any Mythology or any want. book My dear child. easily I wish be a one I to may be faithful to yourself. in naming the smallest as it sum de- specially You can only fine scholar. and expenses therefore I feel no hesitation. exertion to secure for your weekly yourself with very little with not more exertion pends the second on highest compatible sum. and with health and sufficient recreation just how much or how of rewards. than is perfectly to secure the largest." little Lowell We do not hear carefully graded system that he be- profited by this time after his college days His rustication but it was some faithful to himself." subjected him gan really and to be the criticism to which it his own judg- at college disturb his faith in against did not seriously had his natural boyish grievance that he would ment. but for he not recognizing the powers and literally cursed the world forth, and he most lustily of revolt against that tasks was one that lie first launched him- not put unappreciative world. The spirit carried with him far enforced years. When he shy of mak- into his middle profession of letters he fought bound to perform. self in the that he might be to write every week, ing any promises llke to bind myself be able to," he says I should not doubt that I shall later he tells though I have no twenty-five years of his first editor. and has just declined an offer a to correspondent that he year to write four pages so month- many four thousand dollars a mistake A to infer. protestations however. as of indo- y. It inferred. would be and as his own believe. that Lowell's of have constantly tempt one to from pure idleness hatred ence of routine work that sprang although he despised debt out temperament. It is during true his earlier to years harness entirely his Pega- and of it, was he could seldom not bring the himself sake of clearing himself. what- It sus ever SO lightly for under drudgery of any sort editing of soever, whether it or with the duties of a work as is true that he chafed was connected with the profes- rhe Atlantic Monthly. or with the details of his not happy, sorship at Harvard, Spain and to England. He to was play, On the Minister to without abundant time work boy or man, was never happy in scamping any himself. other hand, he As a reviewer he did not spare for 'he undertook. White's Shakespeare for The Atlantic, In reviewing Biography. By. Hornco JAMES RUSSELL In: LOWELL. two volumes. A Cloth: New 8vo. ork. PP: Elisha Price, $3.50. Scudder Houghton, Mifflin & Co.: office as :- permission. Reproduced - with 100 permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without example, he read over twice every word of much reciprocity in the 'Intercourse. As R the commentary and notes and then laid comparative` stranger might draw from the book aside that his impression might Lowell one of his most delightful letters, If settle and clarify before he wrote his crit- some question he sent him happened to Icism. Concerning an article on Wedg- catch him at a favorable moment, when he wood's Dictionary he wrote to Mr. Norton: needed only an occasion for the letter that You know my unfortunate weakness for was on tap, so these students, one or more, doing things not quite superficially. So I offered an easy audience, and Lowell, rare- have been a week about it-press waiting. devil at my elbow, mean the printer's ly out of the mood for talk, would spin his every dictionary and vocabulary I own gradually gathering in a semicircle round gossamer or weave his strong fabric for my chair and three of the days of twelve them as well as for any one else, without solid hours each. And with what result? At most six pages. which not six men will paying very close heed to them personally." care anything about And now it Is done, And Mr. Barrett Wendell's story of Lo- I feel as if i had taken hold of the book the wrong way and that I should have do well's essential indifference to his pupils is voted myself to his theory more and to par- quoted. Although Mr. Wendell had been nn ticulars less: or, rather, that I ought to enthusiastic pupil, and had freely used L2- have had more space. well's hospitality he had made so tittle im- Perhaps the most striking impression pression on him that when they met ngain given by these volumes (and given more after no great Interval of time. Lowell had emphatically than by the Letters ") is quite forgotten his face and had almost for- the interplay of the two opposing elements gotten his name. This certainly was not a in Lowell's character-swiftness of intuition quality to further the success of a public and sobriety of ultimate judgment. His man. Up to the time he was appointed wit was so quick to strike. his enthusiasm Minister to Spain. he lived in a smuli so prompt to take fire. that in his younger world with a comparatively narrow range days especially one looked for the extreme of personal associations. He traveled more views that have been the curse of all re- or less, but the greater part of his time was forming periods. But even in his younger spent In a small circle of friends who days he showed potential tolerance and shared his tastes, or among his books. This breadth of feeling. a caution in yielding his seclusion and concentration of interests. mind absolutely to any strong impulse. His nevertheless. the non-partisan nature of patriotism was the only emotion to which his political ideas, his familiarity with he gave himself without consideration. great literature all played their part in fit- The connection with The (Anti-Slavery) ting him for the highest type of diplomatic Standard had not altered Lowell's position life, and In the opinion of his biographer in politics," writes his biographer of a time were largely responsible for the pecullar when Lowell was most swayed by the great grace and ease. with which he filled the Issues that resulted in the civil war. position for which he was in minor details It found him an independent and left him NO little prepared. For the personal Inter- so. He was no less reformer at the end than he was at the beginning. But he was course with Englismen demanded of him confirmed in his belief that the world must as Minister to the Court of St. James's ne be healed by degrees. and as he was a dls- believer in the short cut to emancipation was specially adapted for reasons which by way of disunion. so he was at once a firm Mr. Scudder sets forth as follows: believer In radical reform. but skeptical of ultimate success through the rooting out of The English more than any other nation individual evils. He found himself among have cultivated the dinner table and the people who were sure of their panaceas. social meeting for the purpose of exchang- He himself in the first flush of his restless Ing Ideas regarding public affairs. desire for activity had been disposed, under was natural that Lowell should be in de- the influence of the woman he loved. to mand on such occasions. and it was Inevit- attack the evil of intemperance by the able that he should make remarkable im- method of total abstinence. but his zeal pression. He had the readiness of prnc- was short lived. He appears never to have ticed writer, and he had above all spon- accepted woman suffrage as the solution of taneousness of nature which made him one the problem of society and It IS doubtful if of the best of conversationalt It was at any time he would have given his adhe- but slight remove from his lecture room sion to the mode of Immediate emancipa- at Harvard or his study at Elmwood to an tion If he had been called upon to discuss English dinner table. and the themes on it. His imagination and his sense of humor which he was called upon to speak were both prevented him from being a thick and very familiar to him. Literature, the com- thin reformer. and he refused to allow his mon elements of English and American life. hatred of slavery to be complicated with the distinctiveness of America, these were practical measures for the reform of vari. subjects on which he was nt home, and he ous other evils which troubled society. It brought to his task a manner quiet yet was because he saw in slavery In the finished by years of practice. Had set orH- United States the arch foe of freedom and tions been his business he would scarcely the Insidious corrupter of National life have made so remarkable an impression as that he concentrated his reforming energy he made by his off-hand speeches. upon this evil. Naturally much space and attention are As we have said. the love of country given to the seven brilliant years of amounted to a passion with him. and Mr. Lowell's diplomatic service, but In the Scudder manages to convey its fervor and whole record the experience takes Its place tenderness without descending to a combat as a passing thing. and while it rounds out with those critics who have seen oppor- the effect of public usefulness and effect- tunity to doubt it in Lowell's liking for iveness made by Lowell's continual contri- the English land and people. Hls feeling bution of discussion and comment on public was the feeling natural to the poetic na- matters, it does not interrupt or change the ture. He personified his ideal and loved It. impression of him which dominates all oth- to use his own comparison, as he might a er impressions-that he was a scholar, n woman. The vision of the Commemoration man of letters, a thinker. averse to great Ode was the vision most often with him: activity. content with moderate tasks and O. Beautiful! my Country: ours once more! moderite leisure. essentially almost a re- Smoothing thy gold of war-disheveled hair cluse. peering with Interested and acute O'er such sweet brows as never other wore. vision from his study windows. but happiest Upon his foreign missions he never forgot behind them. The last glimpse of him that he was the champion as well as the shows him there with his books around business agent of the United States. When him. entertaining the friends who came to at his presentation to the King of Spain he him with witty comments on the peculiari- was kept waiting twenty minutes beyond ties of his relentless disease. and preparing the hour appointed for his audience, and for death in the most endearing of his many his Introducer apologized. he replied that 11 moods. A simple incident of these final was nothing to him personally, but it days illustrates as well as anything the should be remembered it was not he but great kindliness of temper that went with the United States that was kept waiting his Incisive humor. He liked to watch the An Englishman who was often his host squirrels and birds about his home at Elm- during his official stay in England is quot- wood. and during his last illness he had a ed as saying: flat dish with stones In It placed convenient T like Mr. Lowell. T like to have him here. to them in the garden. and connected It I keep him as long as can. and am al. ways In terror lest somebody shall say with his water pipe, that they might have something about America that would pro- free time of the improvements to which he voke an explosion. WAS Indifferent enough. Max Muller bore like testimony: ELISABETH LUTHER CARY. Everybody knows. he says. in Auld Lang Syne. that the salaries paid by America to her diplomatic staff are insuffi cient. and no one knew it better than he himself. But when the remark was made in his presence that he United States treated Its diplomatic representative stingly he fired up and discoursed most eloquently on the advantages of high thoughts and humble living Full as any biography of Lowell must be of public affairs. it is nevertheless deeply impressed upon the reader that he was not In the common sense in the least a man of ar. fairs. He lived R life singularly withdrewn and private. Mr. Scudder recalls the liarly impersonal nature of his teaching at Harvard. He gave himself freely, was careless in his exactions. and not only sur. fered but encouraged eneroachments OF his unprofessional hours. At first In Kirk. land Street. afterward at Elmwood. he made his students welcome. and the only difference it may be between an hour In University Hall and an hour by the wood fire at Elmwood. was in the wider range of talk. It was here that his students came meatest 10 him. for it was the men he quickened in the class room who were avid of more just such talk. and sought him In the greater Intimacy of his study. Yet, nearer as they came to him as he sat with his pipe to slippered rase, and much as they drew from him it is doubtful If there was Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Twenty-Seven Poems by James Russell Lowell I MARTIN B. DUBERMAN Prem VII is for Princeton University CharlesHopen Dorr 3/11/69 T HE TWENTY-SEVEN POEMS by Lowell gathered here come from a wide variety of public and private manuscript collections. 1 None of them, so far as I have been able to ascertain, has previously been published, either during Lowell's lifetime or subsequently. It is probable that in some cases their author simply forgot their exist- ence; they had been sent off in letters as special mementos to friends, and Lowell, not being one to copy off and cherish every scrap from his pen, thereafter probably lost sight of them. But it is clear that he would not have published some of them even had he re- called their existence; the "Spanish" poems, for example, were meant to be exercises in the language, and nothing more. The question naturally arises as to which, if any, of the poems should be printed now. Some are close to doggerel and are not likely to improve Lowell's reputation. A few of the more nostalgic or humorous pieces have real merit, but the primary justification for publishing this collection is historical-that is, to "complete the record" and to gain additional biographical insight into the author. The poems are arranged chronologically, with four undated items placed at the end. 1 For a full listing, see "Acknowledgments" at the end of note 40. In using the historical canon as a basis for judgment, it perhaps would have been logical to include every fragment available. Yet I have not done so, for six or seven bits which I came across were so incomplete or trivial, that I could see no purpose-even historical-in publishing them. A few unknown poems by Lowell of greater import are also absent from this collection. Two of these were sent by him (in letters of Jan. 6, 1884, and Oct. 18, 1889) to Julia Stephen, wife of Leslie Stephen, and a great favorite of Lowell in his later years. They are part of a large group of Lowell-Stephen letters recently acquired by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, which the trustees are thinking of putting out in a complete edition. I have also not included the unpublished poems by Lowell owned by the University of Texas, for these are being edited by Professor Philip Graham and will appear shortly in Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Americenfitenture 36, #3 (1963): 322-351. Twenty-Seven Poems by James Russell Lowell 329 "Twould make the heart of King Og swell Pray try it on Doctor Cogswell, As the gust on't slips To his heart from's lips, 'Twill oil his pinions and cogs well. As for your salt and your vinegar, Such puckery, rasp-you-skinny gar- gles are not fit For people of wit, Hardly, I vow, for a free-nigger! No one should laugh but the winner and I don't, as I'm a sinner, For my throat's SO bad I'm not to be had, Though Horace ask me to dinner. VI [Untitled]11 No dewdrop is stiller In its lapin-leaf setting Than this water mossbounded; But a tiny sand-pillar From the bottom keeps jetting, And mermaid ne'er sounded Though the wreaths of a shell, Down amid crimson dulses ¹ 12 In some dell of the ocean, A melody sweeter Than the delicate pulses, The soft, noiseless metre, The pause & the swell Of that musical motion. VII [Untitled 13 "the cheese came safely & is pronounced by the conoscenti [sic] to be admirable. I should have acknowledged it long ago, but that you said 11 Dated March 13, 1866 (Barrett Library, University of Virginia). 12 Seaweed. 18 To C. H. Dorr, March II; 1869 (Houghton Library, Harvard). 330 American Literature in your note that you hoped it might inspire some verses. Cheese, even when so good as yours, is hardly a subject for the Muse-though onc can imagine that famous Roman Docino Mus to have chosen it as a happy theme. But what could be done with it in English & in rhyme? Let me see: What odor from Sabean shores Intoxicates the seaward breeze? My Fancy, resting on her oars, Murmurs enchanted-"it is Cheese!" Or: O, strong the middle-aged to please, Who find more gust in Swift than Milton, Be thou my theme, ideal cheese, Thy race's proudest blossom, Stilton! You see it won't do! Or shall we disguise it? What gift is this that crowns my day, Sent me some kindhearted fairy, That tells of meadows cropt in May, Of milkmaids blithe, 'twixt work & play, Bringing sweet burthens to the dairy? Or shall we be solemn & epical? Of cheese I sing: Iö, be thou my Muse, Transformed by jealous Hera to a cow! On the whole, I think we must try something between verse & prose, & we will take trochaics as easier than either. On the 19th Februáry Just three days before my birthday, Three whole days ere I was fifty, Came the cheese, the mity-reeker. Ere the bell was rung I snuffed him, Snuffed him ere the door was opened, And exclaimed in gratulation, "Yes! I nose it must be Stilton!" Gratefully we entertained him, Sniffed at him & found him horrid, Sweet & nasty like Catullus,- Tasted him & owned him perfect: Twenty-Seven Poems by James Russell Lowell 331 And our friend, the mediâeval,¹4 Come to celebrate my birthday Tasted too, & sighed "Delicious!" Not displeased 'twas caviare Pueris, virginibusque. After dinner Annie took him And, within the china-closet, In his tin & lacquer coffin, (Casket-vulgar Yankees call it) Laid him gently till tomorrow. There he showed his strength prodigious, For, two burglars having entered, Raised the lid with zeal incautious, And were floored upon the instant, By their noses tumbled backward, Easy captives of the watchman. Then we clapt him in the cellar But he vouched himself so loudly That the mice, the wainscot-peoplers, Knew him, & their mouths SO watered That the whole of 'em were drownded; Had no time to send for parsons, Nor their little pray'rs to mutter, To be happy in the néxt life, In a hollow heaven of Stilton, Safe from traps & from the Devil- In their lingo hight Grimalkin. But the rats, the steady-gnawers, Indefat'gable as conscience, Miles & miles away they smelt him, Smelt him ere he left West Boston, Vowed it was the Good Time Coming, Day of peace & specie-payments, Equal rights & cheese for all rats. So they left our neighbors' pantries, Hardly stayed to curl their whiskers, Or to tie their tails in bowknots, Nor to make their wills delayed they, Rushed pellmell like office-seekers, 14 Probably Charles Eliot Norton. 332 American Literature Shrieking, "Tell us not of Gruyère, And. delude us not with Roquefort! Not a word of Gorgonzola! What are they compared with Stilton, With our life-dream, our ideal?" Then they wore out all their grinders, And their rat-tail-files they polished, But the guardian tin was honest, The grim metal unpersuaded,- General Grant not more impassive. When they found themselves thus baffled, First they all exclaimed "Milldam it! This all comes from Andrew Johnson And his thwarting Reconstruction!" Then they chanted all in chorus: "We are treated worse than niggers, Worse than males not come to manhood, Or than females not allowed to! 'Tis because we have no ballot, That we're robbed of our ideal, Of our golden dream's fruition, Nor permitted to develop All our aptitude for Stilton, If we had the right of voting We'd undo the wrongs of Nature, And the cruel tin should soften, Hymns be changed to hers instanter, And the rats, as God intended, Be supplied with cheese for nothing In a universe of Stilton!" There, my dear Dorr, you can continue that ad libitum-'tis as easy as lying." VIII Naworth Unvisited15 The men that held these ivied walls Were rough & ready in their day, 15 To "Edie," Sept. I, 1872, datelined "Crosby Castle" (Berg Collection, New York Public Library). Lowell began the letter with this comment: "I am like one of Bryant & May's safety matches which cannot kindle unless when rubbed against their special box, & my box is three thousand miles away. But I promised you something:-8 some- Harvard University - Houghton Library / Harvard University. Harvard Library bulletin. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Library. CONTENTS. PAGE TO My GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 1 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 24 PROFESSOR F. J. CHILD. ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS 54 My DEAR CHILD, - A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 83 You were good enough to like my Essay on Chaucer CARLYLE 115 (about whom you know so much more than I), and I shall accordingly. so, far presume upon our long friendsnip as to ABRAHAM LINCOLN 150 inscribe the volurhe containing it with your name. THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL 178 Always heartily yours, THOREAU 193 J. R. LOWELL. SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 210 , Christmas, 1870 CHAUCER 227 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 290 EMERSON, THE LECTURER 375 POPE 385 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 23 correctly described as a man of letters and a rising poet. His most important function as Smith Professor was JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL from the beginning the delivery of one lecture a week on modern literature. He had no fancy for this occupation. THE part assigned to me at these commemorative When he was in Europe in 1855-56, making preparatory exercises is the consideration of Lowell's career as a studies in Germany and Italy, he wrote to a friend about college professor, his influence on University teaching, getting "quietly settled again at Elmwood with the Old and his conception of a University's function in the life Man of the Sea of my first course of lectures off my of a nation. shoulders." In September 1856, when he had returned Lowell was appointed Smith Professor of the French to Cambridge, he says, "I have not begun to lecture yet, and Spanish languages and literatures and Professor of but am to deliver my old Lowell Institute course first, Belles-Lettres in 1855, his only predecessors in that chair and then some on German literature and Dante." When being George Ticknor, the historian of Spanish litera- he was thinking to go from Germany into Italy in ture, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, each of whom January 1856, he refers to his College appointment held that professorship for eighteen years. Lowell was thus "It takes me a great while to learn that I have a titular professor on the Abiel Smith endowment for tether round my leg - I who have been used to gallop thirty-one years, but was absent in Europe for some- over the prairies at will - and I find myself brought up thing more than ten years out of that period. He had no now and then with a sharp jerk that is anything but natural inclination toward the work of a teacher but he pleasant to the tibia. But I suppose I shall learn to stand welcomed his appointment to the professorship because quietly up to my manger at last." About the same time it gave him a small but sure income as a supplement to he wrote to another friend, "Yesterday I began my lec- the somewhat unreliable proceeds of his literary labors. tures and came off better than I expected; for I am It was a course of lectures on English literature at the always a great coward beforehand. I hate lecturing; for Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855 which occasioned I have discovered (entre nous) that it is almost impossi- his election to the Smith professorship. He then for the ble to learn all about anything, unless indeed it be some first time appeared formally as a critic and historian of piece of ill luck, and then one has the help of one's literature. Up to that date Lowell would have been most friends, you know." In May 1857, he wrote to his friend Stillman, 1 An address delivered at a celebration of the one-hundredth anni- versary of the birth of James Russell Lowell, by the Cambridge While my lectures are on my mind I am not myself, Historical Society, February 22, 1919. and I seem to see all the poetry drying out of me." 24 A LATE HARVEST JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 25 The delivery of these lectures on modern literature his teaching of liberty, toleration, and nobler prospects once a week remained Lowell's chief teaching function for mankind. In these intimate meetings Lowell was at for twenty years; but at intervals he also gave instruc- his best as a teacher, because he was much of the time tion in elementary Spanish and Italian, when no instruc- teaching the beauty in the thoughts, phrases, and words tor had been obtained in these languages for the current of a transcendent genius. He illustrated these lessons year or term, or when one or more of the teachers of with ideas, words, and phrases drawn from other litera- these subjects fell ill.) For example, in 1859-60, the study tures, especially from English literature. His own of all modern languages being optional, Lowell taught memory for choice words and felicitous phrases was the elements of Spanish and Italian to volunteers three marvelous for he remembered not only the words and times a week for each language. This service must have phrases themselves, but the places where he had seen been to him a real affliction and a serious interruption them. In the autumn of 1872 I was asking him about of his active work as editor and essayist. In 1860-61, the word "rote," then in use among sailors and fisher- there being no instructor in Italian, Professor Lowell men on the coast of Maine to indicate the sound of waves gave the instruction in that language in the senior year beating on a rocky shore, not on a pebbly or sandy beach. to an elective class three times a week. In 1869, Assist- Lowell rose from his chair, climbed to a top shelf in his ant Professor Cutler being ill, Lowell says "I am library, took down a small book of the seventeenth cen- shepherding his flocks for him meanwhile - now lead- tury, turned its leaves for a moment, and handed me the ing them among the sham-classic pastures of Corneille, page on which the word "rote" occurred in precisely the where a colonnade supplies the dearth of herbage now sense in which a man born on the island where I had my along the sunny broad-viewed uplands of Goethe's prose. summer camp used the word, when we were trying to It is eleven o'clock and I am just back from my class. At cross Frenchman's Bay in a thick fog. Suddenly he four I go down again for two hours of German, and at shouted to me from the bow, "We 're just right. I hear half-past seven I begin on two hours of Dante." the rote on Stave Island Thrumbcap." Lowell resumed The last clause is an allusion to Lowell's evening meet- his easy-chair and his pipe, and remarked, "It is many ings with a few advanced students of Italian in his study years since I have had that book in my hand or have at Elmwood, meetings which were maintained through- heard that excellent word." out most of Lowell's active service as a professor. There These classes in his library - in sharp contrast he gave a few appreciative students a critical survey of with his public lectures - were always agreeable to Dante's greatest works, revealing to them the innumer- Lowell, and delightful to the few students who there able beauties of the poet's thought and style, and also gathered about an admired and beloved master. 26 A LATE HARVEST JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 27 Professor Lowell remained the official head of the De- was strongly reenforced, and its position in the Univer- partment of Modern Languages from his first appoint- sity greatly improved; and Professor Lowell was no ment in 1855 till he began his diplomatic service in 1877; longer called upon for elementary or routine work. but those duties were light and occupied very little of his time. In the early years of his service as professor he Lowell's influence as a university teacher illustrated attended with approximate regularity the meetings of some of his own fundamental convictions. He believed the College Faculty, particularly during the administra- that language should always be taught primarily as the tions of President Walker and President Felton. Thus vehicle of beautiful literature, whereas most language the records of the College Faculty show that he attended teachers of that day were using admirable literature as ninety-two meetings out of one hundred and sixty-one means of teaching grammar and philology. He thought between July 1859, and December 1862. This attend- it much more important for a boy, or a man, to learn to ance must have been for him a serious sacrifice: for at appreciate and love the beauty and grace of literature as that time the meetings of the Faculty were held in the a vehicle of sound philosophy and living truth than to evening. become familiar with the genealogy of words or the logic During the greater part of Lowell's service as a pro- of grammar; to enjoy the rhythm and flow of good fessor he was much occupied with editorial functions poetry than to study the technique of its metres. The and in writing for reviews and magazines. He was the spiritual contents or substance of fine literature seemed first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and was associated to him much more important than its conventions or with Professor Norton in the editorship of the North usages as to forms or derivations. He thought it hard American Review, and to both these periodicals he con- and unnecessary that any competent student should be tributed a large number of articles, both political and lit- obliged to choose between devoting himself to philology erary. The two occupations were not inconsistent and and accurate linguistic scholarship on the one hand or to probably each helped in some measure the other. the real products of poetic and dramatic genius on the His first appointment as a diplomat President other. Was there not time for both ? He held the opin- Hayes appointed him Minister Resident at the Court ion - decidedly heretical in a Harvard professor of his of Spain in 1877 - was peculiarly appropriate, because time - "that there is neither ancient nor modern on the of his thorough knowledge of the Spanish language and narrow shelves of what is truly literature." literature - a knowledge which his work as a professor Lowell's conception of the function of a University had made ampler and more exact. was always lofty, though subject to some fluctuations of After 1869-70 the department of modern languages opinion as to discipline and scope. He declared that A LATE HARVEST JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 28 29 "the fame and usefulness of all institutions of learning (1886) of the foundation of Harvard College, "was the depend on the greatness of those who teach in them, and stuff out of which fortunate ancestors are made, and great teachers are almost rarer than great poets." twenty-five years ago their sons showed in no diminished Further, it was his opinion that Harvard College up to measure the qualities of the breed." Those sons have the middle of the nineteenth century had had no great now in their turn been the progenitors of a valid race, teachers. It had had many devoted teachers but no as the services of Harvard's sons in the recent Great great ones, capable of inspiring as well as informing and War loudly proclaim. In the first four lines of the second guiding youth. He often lamented that Harvard's stanza of Lowell's immortal Ode, recited at the Harvard grounds and buildings had no beauty or charm, and Commemoration in July 1865, he exalts the teachings commiserated the Cambridge graduates who came over of Harvard College through six generations, and the with the early immigrations for "the pitiful contrast fruitage of those teachings - which they must have felt between the carven sanctua- Today our Reverend Mother welcomes back ries of learning they had left behind and the wattled fold Her wisest scholars, those who understood The deeper teaching of her mystic tome, they were rearing here on the edge of the wilderness." And offered their fresh lives to make it good. Another indispensable equipment of a University was manifestly books; and in this respect he thought that When President James Walker, about 1856, asked the College, and the New England ministers and teachers Lowell what his notion of a university was, he answered, bred at the College, fared pretty well during the first two "A university is a place where nothing useful is taught hundred years. He himself, growing up in the first half but a university is possible only where a man may get of the nineteenth century at and near Harvard College, his livelihood by digging Sanskrit roots." In his admir- had, he thought, no great teacher, but many good books. able oration at Harvard's two hundred and fiftieth anni- If the intellectual and aesthetic resources of the College versary he explains what he meant by that somewhat during the first two hundred years were but scanty in his cryptic statement. "What I meant was that the highest view, he did not fail to perceive that the College supplied office of the somewhat complex thing SO named (a the greater part of New England with teachers and min- university) was to distribute the true bread of life, the isters who were wise leaders in communities of which pane degli angeli, as Dante called it, and to breed an Lowell himself could say, "in civic virtue, intelligence, appetite for it; but that it should also have the means and general efficacy I seek a parallel in vain." "This," and appliances for teaching everything." he declares concerning the Harvard human product, in Although Lowell was a delighted observer of trees, his address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary flowers, birds, and landscape, and thoroughly under- 30 A LATE HARVEST JAMES ] stood the play of the human imagination in poetry, what it does for the bod drama, and the fine arts, his education and experience inextinguishable passion left him at sixty years without even an elementary train- life away from prose, fro failure. Unless it know ing in any exact science, and without knowledge of the ning, it is a failure. Ha great part played by the imagination in scientific re- trying to do it ? search, or perception of the oneness or identity of modern methods of advancing knowledge in all fields of inquiry. These words sugge These personal limitations considered, how splendid is must have universitie this conception of the function of a university - Let the Humanities be maintained undiminished in their ancient right. Leave in their traditional preeminence those arts that were rightly called liberal those studies that kindle the imagination, and through it irradiate the reason; those studies that manumitted the modern mind ; those in which the brains of finest temper have found alike their stimulus and their repose, taught by them that the power of intellect is heightened in proportion as it is made gracious by measure and symmetry. Give us Science, too, but give first of all, and last of all, the science that ennobles life and makes it generous. Although Lowell says of himself that he was "by tem- perament and education of a conservative turn," he was all his life a stout believer in democracy of the town- meeting sort; but he sometimes had qualms about its tendency to materialism, and its slowness in the cen- turial process of developing civilization. How high his standards for democracy were appears in the following passage from his Harvard anniversary address : - Democracy must show its capacity for producing not a higher average man, but the highest possible types of man- hood in all its manifold varieties, or it is a failure. No matter The Scholar-Friends: Francis James Child and James Russell Lowell The double signing of the following pages calls for explanation. 'The Scholar-Friends' in an earlier form was prepared by me with the intention of making Francis James Child, through his letters to James Russell Lowell, better known not so much to specialists in English scholarship as to the literate 'general reader.' Lowell's qualities as a letter-writer were already so familiar through the abundant publication of bis correspondence that rela- tively few of his letters to Child seemed essential to my immediate purpose. When this paper, in its shorter form, was submitted to Mr G. W. Cottrell, editor of the HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN, for publication in that journal, a question of editing arose. Should the paper be extended, as be suggested, by introducing more of Lowell's letters than I bad included? There were good reasons for pursuing this course, especially on the ground that it would link the friendship of the two men more closely with their scholarship. From the considerable task of enlargement and rearrangement I should my- self have shrunk; but, if a younger band and eye stood ready to undertake it, why indeed should it not be done? With industry and skill Mr Cottrell has performed this task. He has not edited the first person singular out of the opening pages setting forth my initial part in the enterprise. Else- where be has blended bis words happily with my own. He and 1 are equally willing to accept the consequences of this collaboration. M. A. DeW. H. OWN through the ages letters have been the great pre- D servative of personality. The man who writes them can- not help revealing himself. Nor does it stop there. The tone and spirit of his letters vary with the natures of the friends to whom he is writing, and, though of course less obviously, the personality of each friend is suggested if not actually revealed. The pages that follow speak, with this reciprocal illumination, for the friendship of two Harvard scholars, Francis James Child and James Russell Lowell. Lowell's eminent place among English letter-writers has long been established, through the printing of large numbers of his letters to his friends and to his daughter. Not so with Child. Only one small collection of Child's letters, A Scholar's Letters to a Young Lady, issued in 1920 in a limited edition, has shown the quality of his correspondence. Harvard Library bulletin V. 5, #3 (1951): 304-327; V. 1/1952):91-1095 V. 6, 2(1952) 219-2370 2 136 Harvard Library Bulletin The ten opening pages of that little book, edited by me, were devoted to a biographical sketch, 'Francis James Child.' It would bc superfluous to repeat in this place the main facts of his life and work - facts that may now be gathered in greater detail with the aid of the bibliography following the article on Child in the Dictionary of Amer- ican Biography. From my own first reading of the 'Scholar's Letters,' they seemed to me, as they still seem, to possess a peculiar charm. Among the published Letters of Gamaliel Bradford is one which he wrote to me immediately on reading the Letters to a Young Lady. 'I am rather an epicure in letters,' he said, 'having made a business as well as a pleasure of them for a great many years, and I do not know of any American letters that are superior to these, if any equal.' A few years later, having been given access to other letters of Child's, including a number to Lowell, he wrote to Mrs Gilbert Campbell Scog- gin, Child's daughter, in a similar vein of appreciation, saying, 'It does seem to me that a book with the title "Letters of James Russell Lowell and Francis James Child" ought to attract notice, and, notice once attracted, no one could fail to read with interest and delight.' In this I could not help feeling an implied challenge to do something about it. Many circumstances have deferred my taking it up until this late day. In the meanwhile, considerable numbers of Child let- ters to Lowell and of Lowell to Child had been placed in the Harvard College Library by Mrs Scoggin. Not quite untouched, 2 this corre- spondence now seems - in view of the enlarged conception of the pres- ent undertaking - deserving of publication substantially in its entirety, for its testimonial to a warm and rich friendship between two highly gifted men and for its vivid conveying of personality. Child's letters, covering, in the very nature of things, a far wider range of interest than those addressed to a 'Young Lady, yet couched in similarly sen- sitive, humorous, affectionate terms, clearly explain his place among his contemporaries as a uniquely beloved man and scholar, while greatly reinforcing his claim to high cpistolary rank. Those of Lowell, though 1 The recipient of these letters wished at the time of their publication to be name- less, and her wish was observed. She may now be identified as the late Miss Emily Tuckerman of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. 2 Four of the Lowell letters to Child (14 April 1878, 30 December 1879, 2 Febru- ary 1883, December? 1883) were printed - with important omissions, be it said by Norton in his Letters of James Russell Lowell (Boston, 1893; revised edition 1904), and Bradford quoted a few characteristic sentences from Child's letters to of Lowell in his 'portrait' of Child in As God Made Them (Boston, 1929). alibuy Harvard University - Houghton Library / Harvard University. Harvard Library bulletin. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Library. 3 The Scholar-Friends 37 obviously of less significance in view of the extent of his correspond- ence already published, nevertheless have seemed worthy of inclusion here, not only as foils for and explanations of the Child letters, but because of their own intrinsic merit. However brief (and they are usually briefer than Child's) they yet invariably contain some flash of their writer's wit or charm. Not the least striking feature of this correspondence is its revelation of the dynamic course of a friendship, from its first formal overtures to its final intimate close. Salutations range from 'Dear Sir' and 'My dear Lowell (if you will allow me to call you so)' to 'Carissimo Ciarli,' 'Dearest Jamie,' 'Deliciae Meae,' and 'Carissimum Caput.' Subscrip- tions run similarly from 'Yours faithfully' to 'Ever your most affec- tionate.' And all this rich development is seen against a background of life's stages from ascendant young manhood through the strains and heart searchings of the middle years to the hard-won serenity of old age. Particularly memorable is the quality of the late evening light that plays over the last letters. Another facet is that of the 'scholar-friends.' Child's pre-eminence in scholarship has been the theme of numerous panegyrics, centering about his monumental achievement in the English and Scottish Popu- lar Ballads. Here we see him in the midst of his unceasing hunt for ballads or in the stern pursuit of verbal parallels, yet delighting no less in the humors of scholarship, ever ready for a pun, a quip, a quota- tion. Lowell the scholar has been overshadowed by Lowell the poet, the essayist, the diplomat, and rightly so; yet in these letters he exhibits again and again a familiarity and concern with the minutiae of research that certainly are not ordinarily associated with his carcer. Each ap- preciated to the full the special virtues of the other, and each was ever ready to further without hint of rivalry the aims of the other. One thinks of Lowell's praise of Child's lectures at Johns Hopkins, of Child's constructive criticism of Lowell's essay on Chaucer, of Lowell, again, ballad-hunting in Child's behalf. Implicit in these letters, too, is the love of reading and of books. In fact the entire correspondence might be said to have reading as one of its cornerstones - reading and collecting. Concern for the Harvard Library is a recurrent theme, and both Child and Lowell were among S'Ciarli' being the transcription of an Italian beggar's attempt to pronounce 'Child.' Harvard University - Houghton Library / Harvard University. Harvard Library bulletin. Cambridge, Mass.. Harvard University Library. 4 138 Harvard Library Bulletin the great benefactors of the Library. Lowell's contribution has already been signalized, at least in part, in the pages of the LIBRARY BULLETIN.4 As for Child, a minute adopted by the Library Council I November 1897, a year after his death, bears such eloquent witness that it is quoted here in full: This minute was read and adopted at the meeting of the Library Council of Harvard University, November I, 1897: - Professor Francis James Child became a member of the old Library Commit- tee (the predecessor of the Council) at the time of its organization in 1859. In 1865 he was chosen Secretary of the Committee, and on April 6, 1867, when the newly established Council of the Library had its first meeting, he was elected Secretary, an office which he held until his death in September, 1896. Until recent years the regular duties of the Council included many matters of detail, and meetings were held more frequently than at the present time. Yet Professor Child was constant in his attendance, since the records show that he was absent from only four meetings during the thirty-two years from 1864 to 1896. This assiduity was not, however, the greatest of his services to the Library. Besides his general interest in all the duties of the Council, the value of his work as a selector of books cannot be over-estimated. His own studies covered a wide range, and at the time of his death he was a director of expenditures for books on the English language and literature, Folk-lore, Italian and Romance languages, Mediaeval literature, Portuguese and Spanish, Scandinavian litera- ture, and Slavic languages and literature. Moreover it is due to his researches and recommendations that the Library possesses a collection of Ballad literature, including manuscripts, which is un- rivalled anywhere in the world. The Folk-lore collection, too, is wonderfully complete for all periods, and if not unequalled, is certainly one of the best in existence, even Slavic Folk-lore being represented. The collection of Mediaeval literature of all nations forms an excellent working library, hardly to be sur- passed at any University except in such large collections as the Bodleian. For all these the University is mainly indebted to Professor Child's loyal and indefatigable exertions. The frequenters of the Library will long miss him in his accustomed place before the little table at the East end of the old Stack, and the members of the Council deeply mourn the loss of one who was wise, far- seeing, and unselfish in his consideration of every department of learning with which the Library is concerned. A true copy of the Record [signed] Morris H. Morgan Secretary of the Council 5 Francis M. Rogers, 'The Libraries for Romance Languages and Literatures,' HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN, IV (1950), 271-276. Printed from a copy sent Mrs Child (and included among the Child papers pre- sented by Mrs Scoggin), with the signature of Morris Hicky Morgan, then Assistant Professor of Latin, later Professor of Classical Philology, and himself a major bene- factor of the Library through his great collection of Persius. Harvard University - Houghton Library / Harvard University. Harvard Library bulletin. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Library. 5 148 Harvard Library Bulletin Finally, the memorable description of Child left by Henry James harks back specifically to 1862. It is so apposite that its quotation here cannot be resisted. James had just come up to Harvard from Newport to enter the Law School, and was boarding with his brother William at Mrs Upham's, where Child was also temporarily a patron: The image most vividly restored is doubtless that of Professor F. J. Child, head of the "English Department" at Harvard and master of that great modern sci- ence of folk-lore to his accomplishment in which his vast and slowly-published collection of the Ballad literature of our language is a recognised monument; delightful man, rounded character, passionate patriot, admirable talker, above all thorough humanist and humorist. He was the genial autocrat of that break- fast-table not only, but of our symposia otherwise timed, and as he comes back to me with the fresh and quite circular countenance of the time before the personal cares and complications of life had gravely thickened for him, his aspect all finely circular, with its close rings of the fairest hair, its golden rims of the largest glasses, its finished rotundity of figure and attitude, I see that there was the American spirit - since I was "after" it - of a quality deeply inbred, beautifully adjusted to all extensions of knowledge and taste and, as seemed to me, quite sublimely quickened by everything that was at the time so tremen- dously in question. That vision of him was never afterwards to yield to other lights - though these, even had occasion for them been more frequent with me, couldn't much have interfered with it; so that what I still most retain of him is the very flush and mobility, the living expansion and contraction, the bright comedy and almost lunar eclipse, of his cherubic face according as things ap- peared to be going for the country. I was always just across from him, as my brother, beside whom I took my place, had been, and I remember well how vivid a clock-face it became to me; I found still, as in my younger time, matter enough everywhere for gaping, but greatest of all, I think, while that tense sea- son lasted, was my wonder for the signs and portents, the quips and cranks, the wreathed smiles, or otherwise the candid obscurations, of our prime talker's presented visage. I set, as it were, the small tick of my own poor watch by it - which private register would thump or intermit in agreement with these indica- tions. I recover it that, thanks to the perpetual play of his sympathy and irony, confidence and scorn, as well as to that of my own less certainly directed sensi- bility, he struck me on the bad days, which were then so many, as fairly august, cherubism and all, for sincerity of association with every light and shade, every cbb and flow, of our Cause. 13 Poems of James Russell Lowell, ed. Thelma M. Smith (Philadelphia, 1950). How- ever, a draft of the last stanza in Lowell's autograph and with autograph corrections, found among the Child papers presented by Mrs Scoggin, would seem to leave no doubt as to the authorship. Superscript(1)-Notes of a Son and Brother (New York, 1914), pp. 320-322, reprinted here with the kind permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons. Harvard University - Houghton Library / Harvard University. Harvard Library bulletin. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Library. PLATE VIIb PLATE VIIa LOWELL IN LATER LIFE CHILD IN LATER LIFE The Myerson File clima "mai volun he ac of his JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL matu ideali son S 1857 340 greate in his in M Thomas Wortham (186 ment (1849) (1850 reprir Lowe Time and place made James Russell Lowell in many respects one with the Transcenden talists: intellectual temperament-he called it a "Toryism of the nerves" - -kept him durin apart, but the personal associations still weighed heavily. Lowell's respect and admira reme tion for Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular increased over the years until his prais A Fab in "Emerson the Lecturer" took on messianic dimensions: "Emerson awakened us Fulle Lowell wrote in 1868; he "saved us from the body of this death." Several years later by Lo out of a sense of irreparable debt, Lowell dedicated to Emerson his most distinguished warm and enduring collection of literary essays, Among My Books: Second Series (1876 in his None of the other men and women associated with the Transcendentalist movement a cun fared nearly so well in Lowell's estimation, but he knew them all, both professional fieth I I and sometimes even as friends. Personal affection could, in Lowell's judgment, redeem Emers the intellectual excesses of his Harvard friend and original Transcendentalist, Charl printe Stearns Wheeler, just as later it would in his friendly relations with George William writin Curtis and John Sullivan Dwight, but toward the likes of Thomas Wentworth Hig ng a ginson, Moncure D. Conway, F. B. Sanborn, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Lowell cordiality was never untainted by an ill-disguised sense of amused superiority With increa Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Ellery Channing, Lowell's lack of sym non t of his pathy led him to misrepresent their work, ignore their lasting importance, and attac their character and motives. In short, Lowell's response to the Transcendentalists H lumo as mixed and contradictory as were his attitudes towards most of the great issues and in any concerns of his times. Like other modern conservatives, he was forced to argue largel cord a in terms of the enemy's formulations, and his ultimate defeat-as well as his intelled was th tual stance-was not unlike that of the New Humanists, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elm match ten Ir More, a generation after. Lowell 336 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 337 Lowell disliked the term "transcendental" when used to describe the philosophical climate in New England during the late 1830s and the 1840s, characterizing it as a "maid of all work for those who could not think." The general index to the ten- volume standard "Riverside Edition" of Lowell's Writings (1890) shows how rarely he addressed the subject of "Transcendentalism" in his published works. Only two of his essays deal with the movement in detail, and both reflect the response of a LL mature Lowell no longer impressed, as he once had been, by the vitality of philosophical idealism and romantic mysticism. "Emerson the Lecturer" first appeared as "Mr. Emer- son's New Course of Lectures" in the Nation (1868); enlarged by the addition of the greater part of Lowell's review of Emerson's The Conduct of Life (1861), it was reprinted in his collection of essays, My Study Windows, in 1871. "Thoreau," also collected in My Study Windows, was written as a review of Thoreau's Letters to Various Persons (1865), but it is, in fact, Lowell's fullest discussion of the Transcendentalist move- ment. His earlier review of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and his sympathetic essay on Sylvester Judd's poem, Philo: An Evangeliad (1850), Lowell's only other prose writings on the Transcendentalists, were never reprinted by him, but they have been edited by Graham H. Duncan in "James Russell Lowell's Reviews of American Belles-Lettres." Transcenden- Although Transcendentalist principles inspired many of the poems Lowell wrote '-kept him during the decade following his graduation from Harvard in 1838, he is better : and admira- remembered for his satiric attacks on the movement in his Class Poem (1838) and ntil his praise A Fable for Critics (1848). A more balanced but still unsympatheic poem on Margaret vakened us, Fuller and Amos Bronson Alcott, "Studies for Two Heads," was frequently reprinted al years later, by Lowell after its first appearance in Poems: Second Series in 1848. Except in his distinguished warm tribute to "Agassiz" (1874), Lowell left no poetic sketch of Emerson other than eries (1876) in his satiric verses. In an age that tended to memorialize itself in rhyme, this was st movement a curious omission. Emerson, on his part, read some lines "To Lowell, on His For- 1819- professionally tieth Birthday" in 1859 but deemed them unworthy of publication; Edward Waldo nent, redeem Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton did not share his misgivings and saw that they were alist, Charles printed (1893) after Emerson and Lowell died. One suspects-and Lowell's extant orge William writings support the impression-that Lowell failed to grasp the fundamental mean- tworth Hig- ing and the far-reaching significance of Emerson and the other Transcendentalists. ody, Lowell's At first, this failure was largely deliberate. Lowell's Harvard preceptors had grown tiority. With increasingly alarmed at his disrespectful attitude towards them, and finally in exaspera- lack of sym- tion they rusticated him to Concord during the glorious final weeks of spring term , and attack of his senior year. Ostensibly he went there to read John Locke's Essay Concerning entalists was Human Understanding and James Mackintosh's Review of Ethical Philosophy, neither at issues and in any way transcendental, but Lowell thought his time better spent in hating Con- argue largely cord and its country ways and working on his graduation poem. Lowell's tutor in exile his intellec- was the Reverend Barzillai Frost, a man so witless and self-centered as to prove no I Paul Elmer match for the worldly-wise adolescent. Emerson's kindly overtures were another mat- ter. Invited by the older man to accompany him on walks and into his household, Lowell remembered ever afterward "the exquisite suavity of his demeanor toward me- 338 THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS a boy of nineteen and very young for my age." But the pride of the moment over- came this favorable impression, especially when Lowell detected an element of foolishness in Emerson's sayings and, worse, in those calling themselves disciples. Fre- quent reports went out to Cambridge of the curious amusements of Concord. Im- mediately after his introduction to Emerson's circle, Lowell wrote to his classmate Nathan Hale: Emerson is a very pleasant man in private conversation but his "talk" did not increase my opinion of his powers. He seemed to try after effect &-fail. After all I'd heard of him, as an Eagle soaring in pride of place, I was surprised to see a poor little hawk stoop- ing at flies or at best sparrows & groundlings. The "elect" would have pleased you, or I'll lose my guess. There was E[dward]. A[ugustus]. R[enouf did naught but ogle. R[ufus]. E[llis]. sat wiping the perspiration off his visage which I came to the conclusion was heated by vicinity of nose. W[endell ]. P[hillips]. M. P. scarce said a word, E[dward]. A. W[ashburn]. & G[eorge]. W[arren]. L[ippitt]. did all the talking. I was amused to see that none of the company saving E[merson] & myself made any direct assertion, it was all ?'s-as "Wouldn't it?" & "Isn't it?" &c. (8 July 1838) Four days later Lowell reported having met Thoreau, and his first impression was never corrected: "It is exquisitely amusing to see how he imitates Emerson's tone & man- ner. With my eyes shut I shouldn't kn[ow] them apart." It was during Lowell's unhappy rural retreat that Emerson went down to Cam- bridge to address the youth of the Divinity College. Lowell did not hear Emerson's attack on historical Christianity, and it would be some months before he could read the words in print, but on the authority of hearsay Lowell entered the theological "storm in a washbowl" intent on defending cloth and gown. Writing to Hale on 23 July 1834, he asked: Did you hear R. W. E. sermon (if it be not a sin to call it when our Saviour's admirable discourse on the mount goes by the same name) ? I hear that it was an abomina- tion. Every divinity student that has crossed my path since have I fixed upon & questioned as to their opinion They have asked him to publish it-I hope he will, for if it excites any notice (which I very much doubt) it will put the man down- - if not, why then-each of his disciples will be by 12 1/2 cents the poorer They say (I don't know who, but they do say) that man sees himself in everything around him, if E. could see himself & it didn't drive him crazy (if indeed in that respect he isn't past mending) why-amen. I've talked more about the man than he deserves-but I never can help it. Happily for Lowell the opportunity to set things right was at hand: his class poem would be printed that year because a public reading was prohibited. In halting pen tameters Lowell took after most of the follies of the day-abolitionism, women's rights temperance, and the new philosophy-but it was Emerson's recent Cambridge per formance that elicited his particular disgust: Alas! that Christian ministers should dare To preach the views of Gibbon and Voltaire! JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 339 Alas! that one whose life, and gentle ways, nent over- E'en hate could find it in its heart to praise, element of Whose intellect is equalled but by few, ciples. Fre- Should strive for what he'd weep to find were true! ncord. Im- S classmate Lowell characterized Emerson's confederates in cant as "misty rhapsodists" who having made a "universal soul," t increase Forget their own in thinking of the whole; heard of Who, seeking nothing, wander on through space, wk stoop- Flapping their half-fledged wings in Reason's face, d you, or And if they chance the vestal flame to find, but ogle. That burns a beacon to the storm-tost mind, onclusion Like senseless insects dish within the fire, E[dward]. And sink forgotten in their funeral pyre. .mused to sertion, it uly 1838) During the following decade, however, Lowell repented of the reactionary heresies of his youth and penned on the cover of his Class Poem: on was never one & man- Behold the baby arrows of that wit Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth! Love hath refilled the quiver, and with it wn to Cam- The man shall win atonement for the youth if Emerson's e could read 3 theological The abolition of slavery came to command Lowell's most ardent attention, but , to Hale on on other issues as well he chose the side of the true, good, and beautiful. No doubt Maria White, whom Lowell married in 1844, was a decisive force in his conversion. An earnest thinker and an adherent to Transcendentalism, White had been an early ; admirable participant in Margaret Fuller's Boston Conversations, and her own poetry spoke to 1 abomina- the Ideal in passionately familiar terms. After A Year's Life (1841), his first book of questioned poems, Lowell's verse also reflected current fashion, both in its romantic phrasing and will, for if its idealistic outlook. "Prometheus" (1843), "A Glance behind the Curtain" (1843), if not, why "Columbus" (1848), and "The Present Crisis" (1845) are typical of the best of Lowell's say (I don't committed verse of the 1840s, but the accent here is political, not transcendental. if E. could Even the several sonnets by Lowell that Emerson and Fuller printed in the Dial are, it mending) in the words of Leon Howard, "negatively anti-sensuous rather than positively can help it. transcendental, misty rather than visionary." his class poem Nobody bothers much nowadays with Lowell's "serious" poetry, understandably. 1 halting pen- His real achievement was the satire and humor of The Biglow Papers and A Fable omen's rights, for Critics, both published in 1848, and the public poetry that occasionally appeared umbridge per- after the Civil War. A Fable for Critics spoofs Emerson, Fuller, Alcott, Thoreau, Chan- ning, and Theodore Parker, as well as other leading literary figures who were then striving to forge an American literature. Lowell's criticisms are harsh but usually just, at least as just as humorous caricature can allow. Only Fuller is treated unfairly. Called 340 THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS "Miranda" in the verses, she is lampooned by Lowell with the same lack of grace he claims to have found in her: the Civil War, la at the menace o She's been travelling now, and will be worse than ever; others with his One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she'd be Lowell's S Of all that's worth mentioning over the sea, Transcendentali For a woman must surely see well, if she try, him during his The whole of whose being's a capital I: acquaintance in She will take an old notion, and make it her own, By saying it o'er in her Sibylline tone, of primary impc Or persuade you 'tis something tremendously deep, James Russell L By repeating it so as to put you to sleep; Leon Howard, 1 And she well may defy any mortal to see through it, life to the comp When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it. assessment of Er There is one thing she owns in her own single right, ment on the su It is native and genuine-namely, her spite; a greater numb Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows in James Russell A censer of vanity 'neath her own nose. talists, pales in Thoreau," is ir No doubt Lowell had remembered what Fuller wrote of him two years before in her ning and Thor essay "American Literature" (1846): "Identification holograph for t Lowell is absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy. His interest in Library), and it the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great with legs painf facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant Emerson's orch sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him. Knight-Errant, Modern Reput 1857 All this was long past when the Atlantic Monthly was founded under Lowell's the names. editorship in 1857. The "Newness" of the 1840s was by then historic and its pro- Lowell's e ponents were published by Lowell on equal footing with those of other points of view. Emerson's Dia Thoreau objected to Lowell's unauthorized tampering with one of his essays and never "Lowell, Eme: afterward concerned himself with the journal, but the rest bravely bore Lowell's cavalier magazine was editing until he was succeeded by James T. Fields in 1861. tion with the After that came time for recollection. Lowell's essays on "Thoreau" and "Emer- Transcendental son the Lecturer'' are important historical documents, but in both he addresses himself of the Brook F to personal matters and not to ideas. Lowell had always fancied himself an idealist, 1845), a lette but his idealism was based on the traditions of literature and history, not some transcen- Lowell's ( dent and universal oversoul. He sought to turn the "penetrating ray" of the mind career and his "upon what seemed the confused and wavering cloud-chaos of man's nature and man's Lowell (1894) experience, and find there the indication of a divine offer." The world of the imag. edition of Nei ination was not "the world of abstraction and nonentity, as some conceive, but a world access to the 1 formed out of chaos by a sense of the beauty that is in man and the earth on which of Lowell's cor he dwells." Emerson taught that man was divine; Lowell preferred to bring God down letters. two of to the level of humanity. William Dean Howells, who came to Cambridge just after Eight Lowell ing letters Lo JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 34I : lack of grace the Civil War, later remembered "a saying of Lowell's which he was fond of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he liked to warn himself and others with his homely, "Remember the dinner-bell. Lowell's several biographers have all portrayed his association with the Transcendentalists, but few have considered the movement's powerful attraction on him during his youth. Horace Elisha Scudder writes with the authority of familiar acquaintance in his James Russell Lowell, a book that still contains much material of primary importance. Another "intimate" account of value is Edward Everett Hale, James Russell Lowell and His Friends. Of the more recent biographical studies, only Leon Howard, Victorian Knight-Errant, penetrates the attractive surface of Lowell's life to the complexities of mind and temperament that interest us today. Howard's assessment of Emerson's influence on Lowell is especially commendable, the best state- ment on the subject we shall probably ever have. Martin Duberman had access to a greater number of unpublished manuscripts and letters, but his reading of them in James Russell Lowell, though competent on Lowell's relations with the Transcenden- talists, pales in comparison with Howard's earlier study. Austin Warren, "Lowell on Thoreau," is informed and judicious, though Warren confuses references to Chan- before in her ning and Thoreau in A Fable for Critics. E. J. Nichols is also uncertain about the 'Identification of Characters in Lowell's A Fable for Critics." Fortunately, Lowell's holograph for this section of A Fable has been preserved (in the Henry E. Huntington interest in Library), and it indicates that it is Ellery Channing who treads "in Emerson's tracks his great f pleasant with legs painfully short" and Thoreau who "has picked up all the windfalls" from y will not Emerson's orchards. Howard calls attention to this manuscript in a note to Victorian Knight-Errant, but it passed the notice of some: see Toward the Making of Thoreau's Modern Reputation, ed. Fritz Oehlschlaeger and George Hendrick, which mislocates ler Lowell's the names. nd its pro- Lowell's early venture in periodical literature, the Pioneer, briefly competed with nts of view Emerson's Dial, and for more than just readers, as Sculley Bradley points out in S and never "Lowell, Emerson, and the Pioneer." In 1947 a facsimile reprint of Lowell's 1843 II's cavalier magazine was published, with a brief introduction by Bradley. Lowell's brief associa- drungs tion with the Dial is told in interesting detail in Joel Myerson, The New England nd 'Emer- Transcendentalists and the Dial. Lowell's contribution to the Harbinger, an organ ses himself of the Brook Farm phalanx, provoked a response from John Sullivan Dwight (13 Aug. n idealist, 1845), a letter ineptly edited by R. Baird Shuman. transcen- Lowell's own letters are the great untapped resource for an understanding of his the mind career and his times. Charles Eliot Norton's edition of the Letters of James Russell and man's Lowell (1894) is limited by Norton's decorous hesitations. M. A. DeWolfe Howe's the imag- edition of New Letters of James Russell Lowell (1932) is limited by Howe's restricted uta world access to the letters. The need for a much fuller and more faithfully edited volume on which of Lowell's correspondence is evidenced by the many recent articles that publish selected God down letters, two of which bear on his relations with the Transcendentalists. Joel Myerson, just after 'Eight Lowell Letters from Concord in 1838," a series of highly amusing and reveal- ing letters Lowell wrote to his Harvard classmate George B. Loring, is nicely com- 342 THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS plemented by Philip Graham, "Some Lowell Letters," which include letters Lowell wrote at the same time to Nathan Hale. Graham's omission of one of the best of the letters to Hale is corrected in Myerson, "Lowell on Emerson." "The Letters of James Russell Lowell to Robert Carter 1842-1876," replete with important references to various Transcendentalists and especially those who contributed to the Pioneer, were the subject of a worthy master's thesis by Quentin G. Johnson. Privately owned at the time of Johnson's work, the forty-seven letters are now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The valuable correspondence of Lowell's first wife is also more accessible than it was when Hope Jillson Vernon presented The Poems of Maria Lowell with Unpublished Letters and a Biography. It is to this area of primary documentation that scholarly attention now needs be turned. Jam Aia me Trai tion Essa Mar Col You X NEW LETTERS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL EDITED BY M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE ILLUSTRATED See page 155 f for letters from Bor Harbar NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (Crayon portrait by Charles Akers) 1932 LIBRARY I54 NEW LETTERS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL [1871 1871] TO HIS DAUGHTER I55 Ithaca in the ensuing spring. In January of 1870 he visited Balti- darn a hole in the one, you may not dam it in the other. You see more as a lecturer, and wrote characteristic letters to his daughter how wise I was in running away from the Phi Beta dinner. about the gout that afflicted him there. To Fields, in February, Mamma (who is still suffering from a prolonged fit of the 1871, there were distressed confessions of carelessness with re- dressmaker, gradually extending over her whole person) joins in gard to quotation in his new volume of essays, My Study Win- kindest messages to all, and dows, and as the year went on his letters bear traces of the engage- ment of his daughter to Edward Burnett, of Southborough, I remain always Mass., to whom she was married April 3, 1872. Here are passages Your loving Father from three of Lowell's letters to her through the months preceding J. R. L. that event. In two of them he is seen near a Bar Harbor then relatively unvisited. MDI To the Same Elmwood, 29th June, 1871. To East Eden, Maine 17th Aug, 1871. My dear little girl,- have just got home from the exercises of My dearest Child,-here we are up under the eaves of the Ocean .B.K., out of the Presidency of which I have at last contrived to House, one of six enormous shanties where people perch in vaca- slip my neck,-Dana succeeding to the vacant throne. The name tion. We are well enough lodged and fed and find very agreeable of Bret Harte drew together a large audience, mostly of your sex. company. Our passage from Boston to Portland was as uncom- We had a very metaphysical oration of nearly two hours from fortable as could be-cars uncomfortable-heat intolerable. You Professor Porter of New Haven half of which the listeners could were parboiled if you shut the window and thoroughly powdered not hear, and the other half they couldn't understand. It was really with cinders on a damp skin if you opened it. The steamer was a an able discourse, but under the circumstances I could not help great relief, where we had a famous stateroom. Of course there thinking what an excellent foretaste the women present were get- was a fog-it began before we got to Exeter in spots as if by ting of that millennial day when they shall be admitted to an equal way of warning. So we poked out of harbor blowing a melan- share in the duties and hardships of men. The orator having used choly whistle at regular intervals and answered by muffled horns the phrase "an incomprehensible All," a wag who was present from anchored smacks hid in mist as if the ghosts of all past wrote on the back of his dinner-ticket the following definition of fishermen in Portland were proclaiming the freshness of the fish a "perfect bore," namely, "an incomprehensible awl." Harte's in the harbor. When we could see their lights they looked exactly poem was not the one he meant to deliver-for That declined to in the fog like pats of butter beginning to melt and spread about come at his bidding, so he read us one from his portfolio. It was them on oozy yellow lacklustre. I soon turned in and woke in the a very clever piece of fun, but he read it SO low that it did not hit morning to a world as gray as if it had [grown] old in a single as it would had he pitched his voice higher. night like Bonnivard. Nothing to be seen but now and then a There is no home news except that a hole is burst in the hose rocky islet if we were very near it. Just before Mt. Desert the which do mightily vex me, as Pepys would have said. What is the fog lifted a little SO that we could see some of the nearer points. difference between a stocking and a hose? That while you may But we have not seen the mountains yet and it is foggy again 156 NEW LETTERS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL [1871 1872] TO HIS DAUGHTER 157 today. Give our love to Mrs D. & M. I write this before break- beside what ought to have been a clear stream, but for the drought, fast on top of a bureau. like the disconsolate shepherd in the song. When she came I had Goodbye, my spurs hacked off for a recreant knight. The air here is SO won- faver your loving Father derfully fine that I can't get tired, try as I may. It is so dry that J.R.L. I wet something the other night and hung it on the inside of the window blind and in the morning it was dry. To the Same I am writing on the verandah using for a desk a book SO small East Eden, 21st Aug, 1871. that it must excuse my handwriting. My dearest child,-Sir I wrote you I have been preternaturally I send you a lot of kisses and am always active, reviving the hardy ways of the medieval men-to which Your loving father class I am beginning to belong. The day after I got here, I walked J. R. L. through a gorge (which in itself was a pretty stiff climb) and Dorr net then, inspired by the precipitous sides of Dry Mountain, I scaled To the Same them, walked over that mountain, and came down upon the road by as steep and much longer descent. The next day I climbed After April 3, 1872, most of Lowell's letters to his daughter, thenceforth Mrs. Edward Burnett, were addressed to her at Deer- Green Mountain to the top of which Mamma was hauled with a foot Farm, Southborough. party got up by your Aunt Agnes. We lunched on the top of the (Harvard 1871) Educaid Burnett (1849-1925) mountain and then a Mr Wheeler and I, instead of following the Elmwood, 11th April, 1872. beaten track, struck straight over the mountain till we came upon My dearest little Hopkins,-We were very glad to get your let- the bed of a stream which we followed till we came out on a wood- ters and to hear that you were SO happy and that the machinery road which led us home. This glen was very beautiful and the of your housekeeping worked smoothly. That you should have had mosses and lichens being very fine as also the color of the rock company to dinner so soon augurs well for the hospitality of your which is all such red granite as you see on the Manchester shore. house. I mean to put it on trial soon, but I fear that Mamma will Yesterday I climbed Newport Mountain the finest of them all. hardly be able to come with me the first time and I shall be too The view both landward and seaward is very fine, and on the impatient to wait. She is rather better and insisted on going down northern side of the mountain is a precipitous cliff of some seven to her French class yesterday. We are very gay in Cambridge hundred feet whence the pines in the valley below look like ferns. just now. I was Miss Lamb's cavalier. I left her on the summit to look over I rejoice in every sunshiny day like this because it will bring the ledge and when I came back (though I passed within six feet its blessing to your new life. I saw your honeymoon last evening of her) I missed her, and, hearing that the whole party had gone and a very beautiful one it was-not rainy, but with both horns down, I pelted after (as I supposed) to find when I reached the turned upwards and brimful of good augury. Everybody sends valley that she was still behind, so I waited exercising my pipe kind thoughts and words and I attach a new importance to myself Horace E. Saudder. V. 2. Boston HM, 1901 136 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL POETRY AND PROSE 137 Journal of a Virginia gentleman during a short admitting this and acting upon it. We can never tour in New England, partly on foot. The date reconstruct the South except through its own lead- 1834, which is now ages ago. There is not a great ing men, nor ever hope to have them on our side deal of it, but I found it truly entertaining. I till we make it for their interest and compatible think I could make selections from it that would with their honor to be so." run through four or five numbers of the Atlantic. Mr. and Mrs. Fields were proposing to make a Now, do you want it? and if so, what do you journey to Europe in the spring and summer of think it would be worth? When I say it is enter- 1869, and asked Lowell to send his daughter in taining, I do not mean for fanatics like me, who their company. Lowell wrote in reply, 19 Janu- would cradle I know not how many tons of com- ary, 1869: have been thinking over your very mon earth for a grain of the gold of human nature, kind invitation to Mabel, and, after turning it in but for folks in general. It is not only interesting every possible way, I have come to the conclusion but valuable, and the character of the author, as it that the only way to treat a generous offer is to be blinks out continually, most engaging. It seems generous enough to accept it. My pride stood a to me remarkable that there is positively not an little in the way, but my common sense whispered ill-natured word from the first page to the last. me that I had no right to feed my pride at my Now you know that I have once or twice pressed daughter's expense. And moreover, my dear Sibylline books upon you which you would Fields, you left me a most delicate loophole for take. Don't let this one slip through your fingers. my pride to creep out of, in conferring on me a I think it might be published afterwards in a small kind of militia generalship of the Atlantic Monthly volume with advantage, but of its adaptation to the while you were away. Now, if you will let me Atlantic I have no doubt." make it something real, that is, if you will let me The journal was printed in the Atlantic in the read the proof-sheets, I can be of some service in summer and fall of 1870, Lowell furnishing an preventing (for example, merely) from writ- introduction to the first number. It was no doubt ing such awful English, and mayhap in some other under the influence of this new acquaintance with a cases, as a consulting physician. Moreover, I fine type of Southern manhood, that Lowell wrote should like to translate for Every Saturday some- to Mr. Godkin, 20 November, 1868: "I confess to 1 Letters, ii. 5. There was a reciprocity of feeling, if we may a strong sympathy with men who sacrificed every- judge from the striking fact that on the right, within the gate thing even to a bad cause, which they could see which leads to the impressive common tomb of the Army of only the good side of and now the war is over, I Tennessee, in New Orleans, is an inscription taken from Lowell's poem, "On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington." see no way to heal the old wounds but by frankly " Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men." 138 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL POETRY AND PROSE 139 thing now and then, as, for instance, the article on to Mr. Norton, "I thought it possible I might be Deak and the dramatic sketch of Octave Feuillet, sent abroad. Hoar was strenuous for it, and I lately published in the Revue de Deux Mondes. should have been very glad of it then. How- May I?" ever, it all fell through, and I am glad it did, for While his daughter was travelling with Mr. and I should not have written my new poem." The Mrs. Fields, Lowell wrote to Mr. Fields a piece of new poem was The Cathedral" which was issued news anticipative of what came to an event a little in book form at Christmas, 1869, as well as in the less than ten years later "Mabel's letters overrun Atlantic for January, 1870. He wrote it during with happiness, which I fully share in reading the summer vacation and took great pleasure in the them. I wrote her a long letter about nothing writing. He had told Mr. Howells what he was yesterday but I did not tell her what you may about, and on being asked for the poem for the (as a secret for you three), that I came very near Atlantic replied " Up to time, indeed ! the fear being sent to Spain, and that in case the Senate is not about time, but space. You won't have should not confirm Sickles in December, the chances room in your menagerie for such a displeaseyou- for me are the best. Judge Hoar told me when he saurus. The verses, if stretched end to end in a was here the other day, that Mr. Fish was friendly, continuous line, would go clear round the Cathe- and that the Assistant Secretary was 'zealous even dral they celebrate, and nobody (I fear) the wiser. unto slaying,' as he was himself. So who knows I can't tell yet what they are. There seems a but my name may get into capitals in the triennial bit of clean carving here and there, a solid but- catalogues yet? That, after all, is the main thing tress or two, and perhaps a gleam through painted for is it not a kind of fame as good as the next? glass - but I have not copied it out yet, nor in- For my own part, I can conceive of no place better deed read it over consecutively." A little later to live or die in than where I was born. he could write to Miss Norton The poem turned I hope Mabel makes a jolly companion. She out to be something immense, as the slang is now- always does for me. If she is as happy as her let- adays, that is, it ran on to eight hundred lines ters show her, I think she must. Tell her I should of blank verse. I hope it is good, for it fairly have told her about Spain - but I forgot it. I trussed me at last and bore me up as high as my shall have my choice of castles to live in, if I go poor lungs will bear into the heaven of invention. there, of my own building." I was happy writing it, and SO steeped in it that if " For awhile last spring," he wrote in December I had written to you it would have been in blank 1 Perhaps it was on this journey that she told Mrs. Fields she verse. It is a kind of religious poem, and is never thought of her father as a poet, but just her father. 1 Letters, ii. 52. 2 Letters, ii. 35. 144 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL POETRY AND PROSE 145 ter," and at the end of the year he issued a selec- more slowly toward conclusions as I get older. I tion from what he had already written, in the first give on an average twelve hours a day to study series of 'Among My Books." But his slowly (after my own fashion), but I find real knowledge growing collection of published writings did not slow of accumulation. Moreover, I shall be too add materially to his income, and he continued to busy in the college for a year or two yet. It is be embarrassed by the poverty of a landholder not the career I should have chosen, and I half who had heavy taxes to pay and only the meagrest think I was made for better things but I must return from the productive part of his estate. The make the best of it. Between ourselves, I de- only relief he could foresee was in the possible sale clined lately an offer of $4000 a year from of some of his land. to write four pages monthly in - The point to be noted, however, is that with all "It takes me a good while to be sure I am this pressure of need, Lowell knew himself so well right. A five or six page notice in the next that he would not, even when a golden bait was N. A. R.1 will have cost me a fortnight's work of a dangled before him, accept invitations to write microscopic kind. My pay must be in a sense of which required of him the diligence and the punc- honest thoroughness." tuality of the hack workman. No. He would Lowell lectured in the spring of 1870 at Balti- attend to his college duties, do what he could for more, and before the students of Cornell Univer- the North American, and accept the occasional sity. In the summer he enjoyed much making opportunity which offered for reading a lecture. the personal acquaintance of Thomas Hughes, who He honored his art, and he refused to make it a visited America at this time. Lowell had known perfunctory task. His old friend Robert Carter him by correspondence, and Hughes, who was an was now editor of Appleton's Journal, and very ardent admirer of Lowell and had introduced the naturally sought contributions from Lowell, but Biglow Papers" to the English public, some- Lowell replied in a letter written 11 March, 1870: what embarrassed the author of those poems by Many thanks for your Journal, which I have quoting from them on all occasions. For his work looked through with a great deal of pleasure, and he gave himself to the reading of old French which I should think likely to do good in raising metrical romances, but the year saw scarcely any the public taste. product, though at its close he brought together "I am much obliged to you also for your pro- a group of indoor and outdoor studies under the posal, though I cannot accept it. I have not time. title of " My Study Windows." "I long to, give I have not that happy gift of inspired knowledge myself to poetry again," he writes in October to so common in this country, and work more and 1 On Goodwin's Plutarch's Morals.