JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891)

Lowell came of a family whose Massachusetts history extends back as far as 1639, and a family notable for the honorable achievements of more than one of its members. His father was the minister of the West Church in Boston, and lived in one of the pre-Revolutionary houses of Cambridge, Elmwood, not very far from Craigie House. There Lowell was born on 22 February, 1819, and there he spent his boyhood and youth, going to a good classical school near by, and thence to Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1838. Already in his student years he was what he remained throughout his life, a great reader-a reader restricted in his range, but one who, within the confines of belles lettres, read widely, copiously, enormously. Indeed, no small part of Lowell's literary work may be regarded as an indication of what happy things good company, the best company, enjoyed continuously, will do for one. And, too, already in his student years he was a writer of verse and of essays, and he was chosen Class Poet in his senior year. The poem was duly written, but was not read on Class Day, because at that time Lowell was in rustication at Concord, having been suspended from the College because of irregularities in attendance upon morning prayers.

After his graduation he commenced study of the law. It was already clear, perhaps clear enough to himself, that his heart was in literary pursuits, but he not unnaturally hesitated to trust himself to so frail a bark as a literary career. From the law he turned for a short time to thought of a career in business, but all the time he was writing, and he announced his final decision in 1841 by the publication of his first volume of verse, A Year's Life. In 1841 also he became engaged to Maria White, who exerted upon him a strong influence, both in giving definition to deep moral convictions which the two shared and in encouraging him to express these copiously in poetry. In 1843 a second volume of poems was published, and in 1844 a volume of essays, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. In the same year Lowell and Maria White were married. He had now become a steady contributor of both prose and verse to periodicals, at first chiefly those active in opposing slavery, and was making a name for himself, and in 1846 he suddenly extended his public with the first of the Biglow Papers. He had not planned to write a series. He had simply turned for variety to a new method of expressing his hatred of slavery, but, as he later said, "The success of my experiment soon began not only to astonish me, but to make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I had in my hand a weapon" able to pierce the ears of thousands. Hence he kept on writing more Biglow Papers, and in 1848 he collected into a volume those now known as the First Series. In the same year he published Poems, Second Series, A Fable for Critics, and The Vision of Sir Launfal, and in the following year a collected edition of his poems. The two volumes of this edition were, however, his last publications-outside of contributions to periodicals-for some years.

In 1851-1852 Lowell and his wife were in Europe for about fifteen months, and in October, 1853, Mrs. Lowell died. Her husband's grief was deep, and his activities for a time almost paralyzed. In 1855 he delivered in Boston some lectures on English poetry, and was immediately thereafter chosen Longfellow's successor at Harvard, his title being Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures and Professor of Belles Lettres. He spent some time in Europe in preparation for his academic work. By 1857 he was back in Cambridge, and in this year he married Frances Dunlap, of Portland, Maine. In 1857, too, The Atlantic Monthly began to appear, with Lowell as its editor;-a post he held for a little over two years, while he also contributed regularly to its pages until 1862, when he and Charles Eliot Norton joined in editing The North American Review. For the next ten years his essays appeared chiefly in this periodical. The Civil War called forth a second series of Biglow Papers (collected into a volume in 1866), and the deep currents of intense patriotic feeling which that War opened up in Lowell also found remarkable and very different expression in the memorial odes which he wrote at the War's close and in following years. The essays which were the result of Lowell's reading and study during his mature years were collected and published in Among My Books (1870), My Study Windows (1871), and Among My Books, Second Series (1876). Before the publication of the last-named Lowell had spent two years in Europe (1872-1874), and in 1877 he was appointed U. S. Minister to Spain. From 1880 until 1885 he represented the United States at the Court of St. James, London. In the latter year, while they were still in England, his wife died. And Lowell himself died six years later at Elmwood, on 12 August.

Lowell's great contemporary reputation rested partly upon personal qualities which the mere reader of his books cannot always know. It rested, too, partly upon work which, intimately con

nected with passing events or with a past stage of American cultural development, is now important historically rather than intrinsically. His very remarkable qualities and powers tended rather to possess him than to be deliberately used for any unified purpose. He was unreflective, and the unity and balance of his character rested rather upon a group of moral prejudices than upon any conscious effort to work out and express through his poetry and criticism and political utterances a single and coherent view of life. Ferris Greenslet, in his excellent biography of Lowell, tells us that he "had a way of uttering a good thing in talk, then jotting it down in his notebook, then writing it to a correspondent, and then using it, a little filed and polished, in whatever he happened to be composing at the time." And Lowell's essays and his mature poetry are full of "good things"-many of them so good that we would not on any account miss them-but too often they are not held together by any general plan or purpose. And this is true of his work as a whole. It is of the nature of casual comment; it is miscellaneous; it represents the call upon his energies of diverse opportunities and interests; and it makes one conclude that Lowell was a man who never quite found himself. W. C. Brownell, in his acute essay on Lowell (American Prose Masters), pictures him as primarily a representative figure, the accomplished mouthpiece, so to say, of mid-nineteenth-century America, uttering its prejudices with his own extraordinary cleverness or, on occasion, depth of conviction. This seems to be a true picture. And it indicates that, while he was little fitted for the work of criticism, still, a certain proportion of his poetry and prose keeps its interest and its value because in it we hear, at its informed best, the authentic voice of nineteenth-century New England.

SONNETS1
III

I WOULD not have this perfect love of ours
Grow from a single root, a single stem,
Bearing no goodly fruit, but only flowers
That idly hide life's iron diadem:

It should grow alway like that Eastern tree
Whose limbs take root and spread forth
constantly;

That love for one, from which there doth
not spring

Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing.
Not in another world, as poets prate,
Dwell we apart above the tide of things, 10
High floating o'er earth's clouds on faery
wings;

But our pure love doth ever elevate
Into a holy bond of brotherhood

All earthly things, making them pure and
good.

VI

GREAT Truths are portions of the soul of man;
Great souls are portions of Eternity;
Each drop of blood that e'er through true
heart ran

With lofty message, ran for thee and me;

The sonnets are given the numbers they bear in the Riverside Edition of Lowell's writings and the Cambridge Edition of his poems. Sonnet III was written in 1840, VI in 1841, and XXV was published in 1843.

The selections from Lowell's writings reprinted in this volume are used with the permission of, and by arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.