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JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
_A BIOGRAPHY_
BY
HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
[Illustration: J.R. Lowell; _Mr. Lowell in 1889_]
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
A Biography
BY
HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
[Illustration: The Riverside Press]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1901
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HORACE E. SCUDDER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1901
TO
G·O·S·
“NAUGHT CAN BE UNWORTHY, DONE FOR YOU.”
PREFACE
The existence of the two volumes of _Letters of James Russell Lowell,
edited by Charles Eliot Norton_, has determined the character of this
biography. If they had not been published, I might have made a _Life and
Letters_ which would have been in the main Lowell’s own account of
himself, in his voluminous correspondence, annotated only by such
further account of him as his letters failed to supply. As it is, though
I have had access to a great many letters not contained in Mr. Norton’s
work, I have thought it desirable not so much to supplement the
_Letters_ with other letters, as to complement those volumes with a more
formal biography, using such letters or portions of letters as I print
for illustration of my subject, rather than as the basis of the
narrative.
I have kept the _Letters_ always by my side as my main book of
reference; by the courtesy of their editor and by arrangement with their
publishers, Messrs. Harper & Brothers, I have now and then drawn upon
them where it seemed especially desirable that Lowell should speak for
himself, but their greatest use to me has been in their disclosure of
Lowell’s personality, for they undoubtedly contain the cream of his
correspondence. I have, however, had other important material for my
use. First of all, Lowell’s collected writings in verse and prose, and
some uncollected writings, both in print and manuscript. After all that
a biographer can do, after all that Lowell himself can do through his
letters, the substantial and enduring revelation of the man is in that
free converse which he had with the world in the many forms which his
literary activity took.
After this I must again thank Mr. Norton for his generosity in placing
in my hands a large body of letters and papers, which he holds as
Lowell’s literary executor; perhaps even more for the wise counsel with
which he has freely aided me in the course of the work. Without his
coöperation the biography could not have been written in its fulness.
My thanks are due, also, to the friends and the children of the friends
of Lowell who have sent me letters and other material; to Miss Charlotte
P. Briggs, daughter of the late Charles F. Briggs, the warm friend of
Lowell in his early literary life; to Mrs. Sydney Howard Gay, who sent
me not only letters, but the original manuscript of Lowell’s
contributions to the _National Anti-Slavery Standard_; to Mrs. Richard
Grant White; to Dr. Edward Everett Hale, whose _James Russell Lowell and
his Friends_ has been a pleasant accompaniment to my labors; to General
James Lowell Carter for the use of his father’s letters; to Col. T. W.
Higginson; to Mrs. S. B. Herrick; to Mrs. Mark H. Liddell for Lowell’s
letters to Mr. John W. Field; to Mr. R. R. Bowker; to Mr. R. W. Gilder;
to Mr. Edwin L. Godkin; to Mr. Howells, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. De Witt Miller,
Mr. J. Spenser Trask, and others.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., 27 September, 1901.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ELMWOOD AND THE LOWELLS 1
II. SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 19
III. FIRST VENTURES 62
IV. IN THE ANTI-SLAVERY RANKS 151
V. A FABLE FOR CRITICS, THE BIGLOW
PAPERS, AND THE VISION OF SIR
LAUNFAL 238
VI. SIX YEARS 270
VII. FIFTEEN MONTHS IN EUROPE 309
VIII. AN END AND A BEGINNING 346
IX. THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY 408
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL Frontispiece_
From a photograph by Gutekunst taken in 1889.
REV. CHARLES LOWELL 10
From a painting by Rand, in the possession of
Charles Lowell.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN 1843 116
From the painting by William Page, in the possession
of James B. Lowell.
MRS. CHARLES LOWELL 306
From a painting by Rand, in the possession of
James Duane Lowell.
MRS. MARIA WHITE LOWELL 360
From a drawing by Cheney, after a painting by
William Page.
HOUSE OF DR. ESTES HOWE, CAMBRIDGE 384
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
CHAPTER I
ELMWOOD AND THE LOWELLS
James Russell Lowell was born at Elmwood in Cambridge, New England,
Monday, 22 February, 1819. When he was about to leave England at the
close of his term as American minister, he was begged by a friend to
make Washington his home, for there he would find the world in which
lately he had been living; but he answered: “I have but one home in
America, and that is the house where I was born, and where, if it shall
please God, I hope to die. I shouldn’t be happy anywhere else;” and at
Elmwood he died, Wednesday, 12 August, 1891.
The place was endeared to him by a thousand memories, and he liked it
none the less for the historic associations, which lent it a flavor
whimsically suggestive to him of his own lurking sympathy. “It will make
a frightful Conservative of you before you know it,” he wrote in 1873 to
Mr. Aldrich, then living at Elmwood; it was born a Tory and will die so.
Don’t get too used to it. I often wish I had not grown into it so.”
The house was one of a succession of spacious dwellings set in broad
fields, bordering on the Charles River, built in the eighteenth century,
and occupied for the most part, before the War for Independence, by
loyal merchants and officers of the Crown. They were generous country
places, pleasantly remote from Boston, which was then reached only by a
long détour through Brookline and Roxbury, and the owners of these
estates left them, one by one, as they were forced out by the revolt of
the province: but the name of Tory Row lingered about the group, and
there had been no great change in the outward appearance of the
neighborhood when Lowell was born in one of these old houses.
From the colleges, past the unenclosed common, a road ran in the
direction of Watertown. It skirted the graveyard, next to which was
Christ Church, the ecclesiastical home of the occupants of Tory Row, and
shortly turned again by an elm already old when Washington took command,
under its shade, of the first American army. Along the line of what is
now known as Mason Street, it passed into the thoroughfare upon which
were strung the houses of Tory Row; a lane entered it at this point,
down which one could have walked to the house of the vacillating Thomas
Brattle, occupied during the siege of Boston by Quartermaster-General
Mifflin; the main road, now known as Brattle Street, but in Lowell’s
youth still called the Old Road, keeping on toward Watertown, passed
between the estates of the two Vassalls, Henry and John, Colonel John
Vassall’s house becoming in the siege of Boston the headquarters of
Washington, and wreathing its sword later in the myrtle boughs of
Longfellow. Then, at what is now the corner of Brattle and Sparks
streets, stood the Lechmere house, afterward Jonathan Sewall’s, and
occupied for a while by the Baron Riedesel, when he was a prisoner of
war after the defeat of Burgoyne, in whose army he commanded the Hessian
forces.
The Baroness Riedesel, in her lively letters, rehearses the situation as
it existed just before she and her husband were quartered in Cambridge:
“Seven families, who were connected with each other, partly by the ties
of relationship and partly by affection, had here farms, gardens, and
magnificent houses, and not far off plantations of fruit. The owners of
these were in the habit of daily meeting each other in the afternoon,
now at the house of one, and now at another, and making themselves merry
with music and the dance--living in prosperity, united and happy, until,
alas! this ruinous war severed them, and left all their houses desolate,
except two, the proprietors of which were also soon obliged to flee.”
Beyond the Lechmere-Sewall estate was that of Judge Joseph Lee, where in
Lowell’s middle day lived his friend and “corrector of the press” George
Nichols, and then, just before the road made another bend, came the
Fayerweather house, occupied in Lowell’s youth by William Wells, the
schoolmaster. Here the road turned-to the south, and passed the last of
the Row, known in later years as Elmwood.
The house, square in form, was built in 1767 on the simple model which
translated the English brick manor house of the Georgian period into the
terms of New England wood; it was well proportioned, roomy, with a hall
dividing it midway; and such features as abundant use of wood in the
interior finish, and quaintly twisted banisters to its staircase,
preserve the style of the best of domestic colonial buildings. Heavy
oaken beams give the structure solidity and the spaces between them in
the four outer walls are filled in with brick, while great chimneys are
the poles which fasten to the earth the tent which seems likely still to
shelter many generations.
The house was built for Thomas Oliver, the son of a West India merchant,
and a man of fortune, who came from the town of Dorchester, not far off,
to live in Cambridge, probably because of his marriage to a daughter of
Colonel John Vassall. He was lieutenant-governor of the Province, and
had been appointed by George III. President of the Council, a position
which rendered him especially obnoxious to the freemen of Massachusetts.
In that contention for strict construction of the charter, which was one
of the marks of the allegiance to law characteristic of the king’s
American subjects, it was held that councillors were to be elected, not
appointed. On the morning of 2 September, 1774, a large number of the
freeholders of Middlesex County assembled at Cambridge and surrounded
Oliver’s house. He had previously conferred with these zealous people
and represented that as his office of president was really the result
of his being lieutenant-governor he would incur his Majesty’s
displeasure if he resigned the one office and retained the other. The
explanation seemed satisfactory for a while, but on the appearance of
some signs of activity among his Majesty’s soldiers, the committee in
charge renewed their demands, and drew up a paper containing a
resignation of his office as president, which they called on the
lieutenant-governor to sign. He did so, adding the significant clause:
“my house at Cambridge being surrounded by about four thousand people,
in compliance with their command I sign my name.”
Oliver left Cambridge immediately, never to return. He succeeded to the
civil government of Boston, and Sir William Howe to the military
command, when Governor Gage returned to England, but when Boston was
evacuated Oliver retired with the British forces. The estate, with
others in the neighborhood, was seized for public use. When the American
army was posted in Cambridge it was used as a hospital for soldiers.
Afterwards it was leased by the Committee of Correspondence. A credit of
£69 for rent was recorded in 1776. Subsequently the estate was
confiscated and sold by the Commonwealth, the land contained in it then
consisting of ninety-six acres. The purchaser was Arthur Cabot, of
Salem, who later sold it to Elbridge Gerry, Governor of Massachusetts
from 1810 to 1812, and Vice-President of the United States under
Madison, from 4 March, 1813, until his sudden death, 23 November, 1814,
a man personally liked, but politically detested by his neighbors. In
1818 the estate, or rather the homestead and some ten acres of land, was
sold by Gerry’s heirs to the Rev. Charles Lowell, minister of the West
Church in Boston, who now made it his home, establishing himself there
with his wife and five children. In the next year his youngest child,
James Russell Lowell, was born in this house of many memories.
The Rev. Charles Lowell was the seventh in descent from Percival Lowell,
or Lowle, as the name sometimes was written, a well-to-do merchant of
Bristol, who, with children and grandchildren, a goodly company, came
from England in 1639, and settled in Newbury, Mass.[1] Charles Lowell’s
father, the Hon. John Lowell, had led a distinguished career as a lawyer
and publicist; and as a member of the corporation of Harvard College,
and of learned societies having their headquarters in Boston, had been a
conspicuous figure in the community. One of his sons, Francis Cabot
Lowell, was the organizer of the industries on the banks of the Merrimac
which resulted in the building of the city of Lowell. A son of Francis
Cabot Lowell was the originator of the Lowell Institute, a centre of
diffusing light in Boston. Charles Lowell himself, springing from a
stock which, by inheritance and accumulation of intellectual forces, was
a leading family in the compact community of Boston, was endowed with a
singularly pure and gracious spirit, and enjoyed an unusual training
for the life of rich service he was to lead.
Graduated at Harvard in 1800, his bent was toward the ministry; but
yielding to the wishes of his father, he entered the law office of his
elder brother, and spent a year or more in the study of the profession
of law. His inclination, however, was not changed, and his father
withdrew his opposition and consented to a plan by which the young man
was to pursue his theological studies in Edinburgh. He had three years
of study and travel abroad. He was a pupil of Sir David Brewster and of
Dugald Stewart, and kept up a friendly acquaintance for many years with
Stewart’s later colleague, Dr. Brown. He met Wilberforce, heard Pitt,
Fox, and Sheridan in the House of Commons, and, as his letters show,
made eager incursions into the world of art.
He carried through all his experience a nature of great simplicity and
of unquestioning faith. His son once wrote of him: “Nothing could shake
my beloved and honored father’s trust in God and his sincere piety;” and
his work as pastor of the West Church in Boston, to which he was called
shortly after his return to America, was characterized by a
single-minded devotion which made him, in the truest sense, a minister.
All who have recorded their recollections of him agree in their
impression of great distinction of manner and a singularly musical
voice. He had a way, it was said, of uttering very familiar sentences,
such as a quotation from the Bible, with singular effectiveness,--a
manner which was peculiarly his own. After infirmities of sight and
hearing had made his appearance in the pulpit rare, he would still, now
and then, take part in the service by reciting in his melodious voice
one or more of the hymns--he knew by heart all in the book. Emerson said
of him that he was the most eloquent extemporaneous speaker he had ever
heard. He had the natural gift of speech, but until one read by himself
some sermon to which he had listened with delight, he would scarcely be
aware that the spell lay in the pure tones of the voice that uttered
it.[2]
Above all, he was the parson, making his powers tell less in preaching
than in the incessant care and cure of souls. In Edinburgh he had
studied medicine as well as theology, and, as his church stood on the
border of a district which was forlorn and unwholesome, Dr. Lowell was
constantly extending the jurisdiction of his parochial authority,
carrying the gospel in one hand and bread and pills in the other. He
knew every child in his parish, and if, as he said, his ministry was an
unclouded one, it was because he was too busy with the needs of others
ever to perplex himself greatly over his own cares. Indeed, it was the
unremitting performance of his pastoral duties which impaired his health
and led to the necessity of his removal from the city to the outskirts
of the country village of Cambridge, four miles away, though doubtless
he was largely influenced also by the needs of the growing family that
surrounded him.
Dr. Lowell had seen something of the great world abroad, and he stood in
an amiable relation to that self-centred, comfortable world of New
England which held to the established order, even though there had begun
within it already the agitation which was to shake the nation. Like many
thus poised, he hated slavery in the abstract, but shrank back when it
became a question of meddling with it: the instinct for the preservation
of an established order was strong. The “abolitionism” which he saw
rising was to him “harsh, dogmatic, uncharitable, unchristian,” and it
disturbed his gentle, orderly nature. From the sheltered nook of
Elmwood, he looked out on a restless, questioning world, but his own
part seemed to be marked out for him. He had his parish, with a thousand
petty disorders to rectify; he had his books, which he loved and read;
he drove to town in his chaise to attend the meetings of the Historical
Society, of which he was long secretary, and he watched the chickens and
growing things in his green domain of Elmwood. The tall pines which
murmur about the old house were planted by him. He brought to the
solution of the new problems which were vexing men the calm religious
philosophy which had solved any doubts he may have had, and if his
equanimity was disturbed he righted himself always with a cheerful
optimistic piety. One of his parish who had grown to womanhood under his
eye, and had married, made up her mind to take a stand in some reform as
a public speaker, and from his chamber at Elmwood--for this was late in
his life, when he was in retirement--he sent for her to come to him.
“I shall never forget his greeting,” she wrote long after. As I opened
the chamber door he rose from the old easy-chair, and standing erect,
cried out: ‘Child! my child! what is this I hear? Why are you talking to
the whole world?’ He was clothed in a long white flannel dressing-gown,
with a short shoulder cape hardly reaching to his belt. His was no
longer the piercing expression, aggressive to a degree, that Harding has
portrayed. The curling locks that gave individuality to his forehead had
been cut away, the gentle influence of a submissive spirit had impressed
itself upon his features. In a moment I was seated at his feet, and then
came a long and intimate talk of why and when and wherefore, which ended
in a short prayer with his hand upon my head, and the words, ‘Now
promise me that you will never enter the desk without first seeking
God’s blessing!’ I answered only by a look.”[3]
[Illustration: _Rev. Charles Lowell_]
This Dr. Primrose, as his son once affectionately called him, had for a
companion one who was the farthest possibly removed from the fussy,
ambitious wife of the Vicar of Wakefield. When he once made a journey to
Europe with Mrs. Lowell and their eldest daughter, the little party took
especial delight in a trip to the Orkney Islands, and in the enjoyment
of friendly intercourse with the Traills from that region; for it was
but a step that Mrs. Lowell needed to take to bring her into close
kinship with the Orkney folk. Her grandfather, Robert Traill, whose
name, together with her own name of Spence, she gave to one of her boys,
had come from Orkney to America, had married there, and left a daughter,
Mrs. Lowell’s mother,[4] when he went back to Great Britain at the
revolt of the colonies. Thus, when Robert Traill’s granddaughter visited
Orkney, she was returning to her own kin. Not only so, but her father,
Keith Spence, came of Highland ancestry, and it was easy to find a
forbear in the Sir Patrick Spens of the old ballad, as it was also to
claim kinship with Minna Troil, whom the Wizard of the North had lifted
out of the shadowy forms of life into the enduring reality of “The
Pirate.”
This close affiliation with the North disclosed itself in Mrs. Lowell in
a rare beauty of person and temperament, together with a suggestion of
that occult power which haunts the people of the Orkney Isles. Whether
or no Mrs. Lowell had, as was sometimes said, the faculty of second
sight, she certainly had that love of ballads and delight in singing and
reciting them which imparts a wild flower fragrance to the mind;[5] and
her romantic nature may easily be reckoned as the brooding place of
fancies which lived again in the poetic genius of her son. She had been
bred in the Episcopal Church, and that may possibly have had its
influence in the determination of her son Robert’s vocation, but in
marrying Dr. Lowell she must have found much common ground with one who
always resolutely refused to be identified with a sect almost local in
its bounds. “I have adopted,” he wrote in 1855, “no other religious
creed than the Bible, and no other name than Christian as denoting my
religious faith.” The few letters from Mrs. Lowell’s pen which remain
contain messages of endearment that flutter about the head of her “Babie
Jammie,” as she called him, and betray a tremulous nature, anxious with
pride and fond perplexity.
The companionship of the elder Lowells began in a happy manner in their
childhood. The grandfather of Charles Lowell was the Rev. John Lowell,
of Newburyport, who was twice married. His widow continued to make her
home in Newburyport after her husband’s death, but when her husband’s
son, John Lowell, the lawyer and jurist, left the place and established
himself in Boston, she also left the town and went to live in Portsmouth
near her niece, Mrs. Brackett. Mrs. Lowell had been John Lowell’s mother
since his boyhood, and after the manner so common in New England
households the titular grandmother ruled serenely without being
subjected to nice distinctions. Charles Lowell, thus, when a boy, was a
frequent visitor at his grandmother’s Portsmouth home, and his playmate
was his grandmother’s great-niece, Harriet Brackett Spence. The intimacy
deepened and before Charles Lowell sailed for Europe a betrothal had
taken place.
There were three sons and two daughters when James Russell,[6] the
youngest in this family, was born. Charles was between eleven and
twelve, Rebecca ten, Mary a little over eight, William between five and
six, and Robert[7] between two and three. All these lived to maturity,
excepting William, who died when James was four years old. Charles by
his seniority was the mentor and guide of his younger brother during his
adolescence, especially when their father was absent, as he was once for
a journey in Europe, but Mary[8] was the sister to whom he was
especially committed in his childhood. She was his little nurse, and as
her own love of poetry came early, she was wont to read him to sleep,
when he took his daily nap, from Spenser,[9] and she used to relate in
after years how hard the little boy found it to go to sleep under the
charm of the stories, yet how firmly nature closed his eyes at last.
His own recorded recollections of childhood are not many, yet as far
back as he could remember he was visited by visions night and day. An
oft-recurring dream was of having the earth put into his hand like an
orange. Dr. Weir Mitchell notes that Lowell told him he had since
boyhood been subject to visions, which appeared usually in the evening.
Commonly he saw a figure in mediæval costume which kept on one side of
him,--perhaps an outcome of his early familiarity with Spenser and
Shakespeare. Most of all in his memories of childhood he recalled
vividly the contact with nature in the enchanted realm of Elmwood, and
the free country into which it passed easily. With the eye of a hawk he
spied all the movements in that wide domain, and brooded over the
lightest stir with an unconscious delight which was the presage of the
poet in him. “The balancing of a yellow butterfly over a thistle broom
was spiritual food and lodging for a whole forenoon.”
Indeed, there could scarcely have been a better nesting-place for one
who was all his life long to love the animation of nature and to portray
in verse and prose its homely and friendly aspects rather than its
large, solemn, or expansive scenes. In after life, especially when away
from home, he recurred to his childish experiences in a tone which had
the plaint of homesickness. From the upper windows of the house--that
tower of enchantment for many a child--he could see a long curve of the
Charles, the wide marshes beyond the river, and the fields which lay
between Elmwood and the village of Cambridge. Within the place itself
were the rosebushes and asters, the heavy headed goat’s-beard, the lilac
bushes and syringas which bordered the path from the door to what his
father, in New England phrase, called the avenue, and which later became
formally Elmwood Avenue; but chiefest were the shag-bark trees, the
pines, the horse-chestnuts, and the elms, a young growth in part in his
childhood, for his father took delight in giving this permanence to the
home; and the boy himself caught the fancy, for when he was fifty-six
years old he rejoiced in the huge stack of shade cast for him by a
horse-chestnut, whose seed he had planted more than fifty years before.
And in trees and bushes sang the birds that were to be his companions
through life. Over the buttercups whistled the orioles; and bobolinks,
catbirds, linnets, and robins were to teach him notes,--
“The Aladdin’s trap-door of the past to lift.”
In those days bank swallows frequented the cliff of the gravel pit by
the river, and Lowell remembered how his father would lead him out to
see the barn swallows, which had been flying in and out of the mows,
gather on the roof before their yearly migration. “I learned,” he wrote
long after,--
“I learned all weather-signs of day or night;
No bird but I could name him by his flight,
No distant tree but by his shape was known,
Or, near at hand, by leaf or bark alone.
This learning won by loving looks I hived
As sweeter lore than all from books derived.”[10]
When he was not far away from his childhood, and in a time of great
sensitiveness, he wrote: I never shall forget the blind despair of a
poor little humming-bird which flew through the open window of the
nursery where I was playing when a child. I knew him at once, for the
same gay-vested messenger from Fairy-land, whom I had often watched
disputing with the elvish bees the treasures of the honeysuckle by the
doorstep. His imprisoned agony scarce equalled my own; and the slender
streaks of blood, which his innocent, frenzied suicide left upon the
ceiling, were more terrible to me than the red witness which Rizzio left
on the stair at Holyrood to cry out against his murderers.”[11]
If we may trust the confession in “The Cathedral” as personal and not
dramatic, Lowell was singularly sensitive in childhood to those subtle
stirrings of nature which give eternity to single moments, and create
impressions which are indelible but never repeated.
“The fleeting relish at sensation’s brim
Had in it the best ferment of the wine.”
A spring morning which witnessed the sudden miracle of regeneration; an
hour of summer, when he sat dappled with sunshine, in a cherry-tree; a
day in autumn, when the falling leaves moved as an accompaniment to his
thought; the creaking of the snow beneath his feet, when the familiar
world was transformed as in a vision to a polar solitude:--
“Instant the candid chambers of my brain
Were painted with these sovran images;
And later visions seem but copies pale
From those unfading frescos of the past,
Which I, young savage, in my age of flint,
Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me
Parted from Nature by the joy in her
That doubtfully revealed me to myself.”