By Grace E. Sellon

Down the street, about a mile from the center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, stands a square, three-story colonial dwelling house, sheltered by pines and great English elms and surrounded by flowering shrubs. In this home, for many years known as Elmwood, the great American poet and essayist was born February 22, 1819, and it was here that he lived during the greater part of his life. In the woods and meadows that lay about Elmwood in the poet’s childhood he spent much time, for he liked especially to be out-of-doors; and so it was that in his earliest years he began to feel the great love for flowers, birds and trees that made him able in later life to show to the readers of his poems how much beauty there is in the very commonest things of nature.

However, all of the things he liked were not out-of-doors. In his father’s library were more than three thousand books, and he began when only a small boy to choose for himself favorite authors. He seems to have been unusually fond of books, for in a little note written when he was eight years old,—his first letter, so far as any one knows,—he tells his brother, “I read French stories,” and adds in a postscript, “I have got three books.” The next year, in a letter to the same brother he writes, “I have got quite a library.”After learning his letters and other simple things at an elementary school, Lowell was sent when about nine years old to a higher school, where he was thoroughly taught Latin, and otherwise prepared for his entrance into Harvard College in 1834. He was then only fifteen years of age, yet he had such decided tastes in his studies that he was not always willing to give attention to the work required in his college courses, but would follow his own inclinations in his reading. The result was, that though he gained such a reputation among his class-mates for appreciation of literature and ability in original composition that he was made one of the editors of Harvardiana, the college paper, and was chosen in his senior year to write the class poem, yet he was looked upon with growing disapproval by his instructors, because of his irregular ways. At length, it is told, he completely disgraced himself, on the day he was chosen class poet, by rising at the close of the evening prayer service and bowing solemnly to right and left. As punishment for this and all preceding misconduct, he was sent to Concord to continue his studies under a private teacher, and was not allowed to return to Harvard until after classday. Nevertheless, he wrote his poem and later had it printed, for his friends, in a little pamphlet.

After receiving his degree from Harvard in 1838, Lowell decided upon the law as the profession most suitable for him to follow, for at that time a literary career in the United States held out no assurance of a living, even to the best writers. In the preceding year he had written to his intimate friend Shackford: “I thought your brother Charles was studying law. I intend to study that myself, and probably shall be Chief Justice of the United States.” This modest prediction, however, was not to be fulfilled, for after completing a course at the Harvard Law School in 1840 and practicing with but slight interest and success for two years, he gave up the law for a more congenial occupation.

His letters to his confidants “Shack” and Loring during the years at college show his aspiration to become a poet. He reports from time to time his progress in verse making and comments more or less favorably on his “effusions.” This writing of pottery—as it pleased him to call it—continued with more serious interest after his graduation, so that in 1840 he was ready to publish a volume of verse entitled “A Year’s Life.”

The same year was marked by another event of special importance,—his engagement to Maria White, a young woman who was herself a poet and who was deeply interested in all the movements of thought that were making toward freedom and justice before the Civil War. Her influence upon Lowell was to strengthen greatly his confidence in his own best powers as a man and a poet and to help develop in him the broad, kind democratic feeling for his fellow-men that most endears him to his readers. This growth of the poet’s character seems the more remarkable when it is considered that his father, a Unitarian minister, was a man who, though most generous and well-meaning in his regard for others, was well enough content with conditions in his country to feel little sympathy with the reforms then being urged for securing fuller liberty and equality. In his new enthusiasm Lowell turned away from the influence of his younger days and became devoted to the cause of abolition.

In 1842, after abandoning the law, he founded a magazine, The Pioneer, which, however, was issued only three times. After this unsuccessful venture he went back to his poetry, and late in 1843 published a second volume of verse. In the following year appeared his first critical studies in prose, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. This work, like most of the first book of poems, Lowell found in later life to be unworthy of reprinting.

The income from his writings, though small, was sufficient for him to marry in 1844; and not long after this event he became a regular contributor to the Anti-Slavery Standard. In this appeared the first series of the Biglow Papers, in which, through vigorous prose and verse, largely in the Yankee dialect of Hosea Biglow, he protested against the evils that brought on the Mexican War. The collected numbers of the series were published in 1848 and shared the popularity of two other of Lowell’s greatest works, produced in the same year,—the Fable for Critics and The Vision of Sir Launfal, a beautiful narrative poem filled with the spirit of Christian brotherhood.

It was not long after this that Lowell began to feel that his work as a writer for the abolitionist cause was narrowing in its effect. For “red-hot” reform he had no liking. It seemed to him that the hope of his cause lay not so much in treating others harshly as in living according to the high principles that the reformers professed. “The longer I live,” he wrote, “the more am I convinced that the world must be healed by degrees. I see why Jesus came eating meat and drinking wine and companying with publicans and sinners. He preached the highest doctrine, but he lived the life of other men.... Let us sow the best seed we have ... and convert other men by our crops, not by drubbing them with our hoes or putting them under our harrows.” He decided, then, to take life in a more leisurely way and let the poetic power that he considered his best gift express itself freely.

In 1851, accompanied by his wife and his two children, Lowell visited Europe. The months spent abroad gave him much wished-for opportunities for study and observation, but they were darkened by the death of his son Walter. Close upon this sorrow came the death of Mrs. Lowell in the following year (1853), after the return of the family to Elmwood. From that time for many months the poet could find relief from his keen sense of loss only in his literary work, and in the companionship of his daughter Mabel, the only one of his four children who had lived.

Some lectures on the English poets given at the Lowell institute in 1854-55 found so much favor with the authorities at Harvard College that soon afterward he was appointed to succeed Longfellow as professor of foreign languages and literatures. After a period of study in Europe, he assumed charge of classes at Harvard in 1856, and for sixteen years continued in this work, bringing to it with most remarkable success all the warmth and sincerity and broad scope of his own interest in the subjects that he taught. Not many months afterward he was still further honored by being given the editorship of the newly founded Atlantic Monthly, a position that he held until 1861. The year 1857 was made memorable also by his marriage to Miss Frances Dunlap, a much-valued friend and the governess of his daughter. In 1864 he became joint editor of the North American Review, and in this magazine continued the second series of the Biglow Papers, begun in the Atlantic Monthly, the series in which is expressed his finest power as a poet-patriot. Of the same excellence is the famous Commemoration Ode written for memorial ceremonies held at Harvard College in honor of the students who had fallen during the war. Among other contributions to these periodicals were numerous studies of poets and poetry—essays that rank among the best of their kind. Thus did Lowell prove himself to possess a rare combination of the powers of original composition and of criticism.

So ably had he served the best interests of his country through his writings, that in 1877 he was appointed Minister of the United States to Spain, and served here until 1880, when he was sent as Minister to England. These high trusts, it proved, had not been wrongly placed. Lowell’s devotion to the truest American principles, together with his large experience in public affairs, made him a most successful diplomat. He was given high honors by British universities, and he made many friends in England.

After his return to America in 1885 he withdrew gradually from his former active life. Occasionally he wrote and lectured, and several times he made trips to England where he always received a cordial welcome. It was in his much loved Elmwood that death came to him August 12, 1891.

Lowell was a man of wide learning, and has a prominent place in American literature for his exceptional critical ability and delightful wit, and for the artistic excellence of both his prose and poetry; but the secret of his power lies not so much in these things as in the sincerity and vigor of thought that rise above all bookishness, and in the warm human feeling that reached out for the love of his fellow-men rather than for fame and distinction. Probably that which most endears him to his countrymen is the quality he attributes to others in these words of admiration: “I am sure that both the President (Hayes) and his wife have in them that excellent new thing we call Americanism, which, I suppose, is that ‘dignity of human nature’ which the philosophers of the last century were always seeking and never finding, and which, after all, consists, perhaps, in not thinking yourself either better or worse than your neighbors by reason of any artificial distinction. As I sat behind them at the concert the other night, I was profoundly touched by the feelings of this kingship without mantle and crown from the property-room of the old world. Their dignity was in their very neighborliness, instead of in their distance.” Certainly in the realm of American literature, there is no one better entitled than Lowell to this “kingship without mantle and crown.”