JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was born in Cambridge, the youngest
of six children. His father, the Reverend Charles Lowell, a Harvard
graduate, was pastor of the West Church in Boston, three miles away.
Elmwood was an ample New England mansion with the literary atmosphere
indoors that is generated by the presence of good books and good talk.
The boy was one of a few day scholars at an excellent boarding school
in town, from which he entered college in the class of 1838. Like many
another man of later distinction in letters, he was more industrious
than regular as a student, wasting little time in fact, but often
neglecting his assigned work and sometimes lapsing into mild disorder
to the extent of falling under college discipline. Toward the end of
senior year he was actually "rusticated" for a combination of petty
offenses. Under this form of punishment the boy, who was for a time
suspended from college, was assigned to a clergyman in some country
town and required to keep up in his studies until his reinstatement.
It happened that Lowell was sent to Concord, and that here (while in
charge of a clergyman with the ominous name of Barzillai Frost) he
was fretting over the class poem, in which he commented with youthful
cynicism on Carlyle, Emerson, the abolitionists, and the champions of
total abstinence and of woman's rights. It was an outburst on which he
looked back with quiet amusement in later years:
Behold the baby arrows of that wit
Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth!
Love hath refilled the quiver, and with it
The man shall win atonement for the youth.
And the proof that the boyish gibes were hardly more than a result of
the impatience at his ungrateful weeks in Concord is contained in his
record of the inspiration which he owed in student days to Emerson the
lecturer (see p. 211).
In the first years out of college, from which he graduated in 1838, he
passed through the oft-trod vale of troubled indecision as to what he
should do with his life. He rejected at once his father's profession
of preaching and abandoned thoughts of the law after he had earned
his LL.B. degree in 1840. And then, following a brief and frustrated
romance, he entered upon an acquaintance which culminated in his
marriage to Maria White and resulted in his becoming a soberer and a
wiser man. She was already deeply interested in the social movements
toward which his mind was maturing. His devotion to her took permanent
form in his first volumes of poems, "A Year's Life" (1841) and "Poems"
(1843), and her influence on him is shown in his zeal for the very
reforms which he had derided in his class poem three years earlier. He
founded a new magazine, _The Pioneer_, which lived for three months in
1843; he contributed copiously to _The Boston Miscellany_, _Graham's
Magazine_, and _Arcturus_; and, what was much more momentous, he threw
in his lot with the abolitionists by becoming a regular contributor to
_The Pennsylvania Freeman_. In the meanwhile, also, in addition to his
purely poetic work and to his reform enthusiasm, he took his first step
toward scholastic achievement with his "Conversations on Some of the
Old Poets," which appeared in a volume of 1844. From now to the end of
his life Lowell continued to distribute his energies among the fields
of poetry, civics, and scholarship.
In 1845, 1846, and 1847 he wrote abundantly, widening his relations
with the magazines of the day and apparently finding no trouble in
marketing his wares. One piece of verse is preëminent in this period
for both immediate and lasting appeal--"The Present Crisis." It was
Lowell's way of protesting at the national policy in the war with
Mexico and, in its contrast with Thoreau's method (see p. 224),
throws light on the reformer's later strictures upon the recluse. It
was repeated on every hand during the next twenty years and was given
special emphasis through its frequent use by such orators as Wendell
Phillips and Charles Sumner. It was in 1848, however, that he came to
the fullness of his powers, contributing some forty articles to four
Boston periodicals and publishing four books "Poems (Second Series),"
"A Fable for Critics," "The Biglow Papers," and "The Vision of Sir
Launfal." He was only ten years out of college, and at that was only
twenty-nine years old, but he showed secure taste, confident judgment,
and a seasoned ease of humor which belong to middle life. In the first
and last, the more literary volumes, there is perhaps more evidence
of youth. It appears in the effusive grief on the loss of his little
daughter, and in "Sir Launfal" Lowell seems to be working too clearly
after the somewhat confused formula laid down in the introduction
to _The Pioneer_. Americans were to attempt a natural rather than a
national literature. They were to remember that "new occasions teach
new duties." "To be the exponent of a young spirit which shall aim at
power through gentleness ... and in which freedom shall be attempered
to love by a reverence for all beauty wherever it may exist, is our
humble hope." So in order not to be too aggressively national, he
derived a theme from the literature of chivalry and adorned it with a
democratic, nineteenth-century moral.
"A Fable for Critics" is less consciously ambitious and more mature.
Just how remarkable a piece of discrimination it was can be seen from
a comparison of the writers criticized in it with those in Poe's
"Literati" of two years earlier. Lowell's subjects are familiar to
the modern general reader; he omitted no man of permanent reputation
and included almost no one who has been forgotten. Poe's selections,
on the other hand, are quaintly unfamiliar as a whole to all but the
professed student of literary history. His judgments on them are mostly
sound, but his judgment in choosing them for treatment is open to one
of two criticisms: either that he could not recognize permanent values
or that, for personal and editorial reasons, he preferred to ignore
them. In the "Fable" Lowell for the first time put to public use his
ready command of impromptu verse. His pen was a little erratic, but
when it would work at all, it was likely to work with happy fluency.
The jaunty treatment of his contemporaries was quite literally a
series of running comments, trotting along in genial anapæstic gait,
stumbling sometimes on a pun, scampering with light foot across
extended metaphors, and taking the barriers of double and triple rime
without a sign of exertion. In point of method the "Fable" was a single
exercise in writing the journalistic verse of which Lowell proved
himself master in the two series of "Biglow Papers" (1846-1848 and
1862-1866). It was exactly deserving of Holmes's friendly comment, "I
think it is capital--crammed full and rammed down hard--powder (lots
of it)--shot--slugs--very little wadding, and that is guncotton--all
crowded into a rusty-looking sort of a blunderbuss barrel, as it
were--capped with a percussion preface--and cocked with a title-page as
apropos as a wink to a joke." Different as it is from "The Literati"
in scale, tone, individual subjects, and method of circulation, the
two deserve mention together as antidotes both to Anglomania and to
wholesale praise of everything American.
With "The Biglow Papers" Lowell returned to the attack which he had
begun in "The Present Crisis." He wrote in 1860:
I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as just ground for it
as a strong nation ever has against a weak one) to be essentially
a war of false pretences, and that it would result in widening the
boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery.... Against these
and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was
born and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely to me. I
tried my first "Biglow Paper" and found that it had a great run. So I
wrote the others from time to time in the year which followed, always
very rapidly, and sometimes (as with "What Mr. Robinson Thinks") at
one sitting.
He wrote the nine numbers of the series not only in the dialect of
the countryside but from the viewpoint of a forthright, hard-headed,
Puritan-tinged Yankee; and he put them out as the compositions of Hosea
Biglow under the encouragement of Parson Wilbur, without the use of
his own name. He was surprised by the cordial reception of the volume,
fifteen hundred copies of which were sold in the first week. If he
had put on the cap and bells to play fool to the public, he said, it
was less to make the people laugh than to win a hearing for certain
serious things which he had deeply at heart. "The Biglow Papers" were
undoubtedly Lowell's great popular success. They carried the fight
into the enemies' camp in the abolition struggle, they were resumed
with new success with the outbreak of the Civil War, and they widened
the reading public for his more sober political prose and for his more
elevated verse.
However, Lowell was not satisfied to be only a fighter. In a letter of
January, 1850, he wrote to a friend:
My poems hitherto have been a true record of my life, and I mean that
they shall continue to be.... I begin to feel that I must enter on a
new year of my apprenticeship. My poems thus far have had a regular
and natural sequence. First, Love and the mere happiness of existence
beginning to be conscious of itself, then Freedom--both being the
sides which Beauty presented to me--and now I am going to try more
_wholly_ after Beauty herself.... I have preached sermons enow, and
now I am going to come down out of the pulpit and _go about among
my parish_.... I find that Reform cannot take up the whole of me,
and I am quite sure that eyes were given us to look about us with
sometimes, and not to be always looking forward.... I am tired of
controversy.
Out of such a mood as this came the natural decision to make his
first and long-deferred trip to Europe, a sojourn of fifteen months
in 1851-1852 with his wife and children. His wide reading of foreign
literatures gave the keys to an understanding of the peoples among whom
he traveled, and especially to an understanding of Roman culture.
His comments from Rome furnish an interesting contrast with Emerson's
("Written at Rome," 1833). The reaction of the Concord philosopher had
been wholly personal. Lowell's was wholly national.
Surely the American (and I feel myself more intensely American
every day) is last of all at home among ruins--but he is at home
in Rome.... Our art, our literature, are, as theirs, in some sort
exotics; but our genius for politics, for law, and, above all, for
colonization, our instinct for aggrandizement and for trade, are all
Roman. I believe we are laying the basis of a more enduring power and
prosperity, and that we shall not pass away until we have stamped
ourselves upon the whole western hemisphere.
On his return to America he plunged eagerly into writing, but the
springs of utterance were soon sealed by the death of his wife.
Following on the losses of his mother and two of his children this
was the fourth and most crushing bereavement within a very few years.
His recovery of working powers was aided by the distraction that came
from an invitation to deliver the distinguished Lowell Lecture Series
in Boston in the winter of 1854-1855. These were to be twelve in
number, on poetry in general and English poetry in particular. The task
appealed to him as combining the beauty and truth to which he inclined
to turn after his years of conflict. He threw himself whole-heartedly
into the preparation and delivery of the lectures and succeeded
admirably with his hearers; but the greater result was an indirect
one. While they were in progress Longfellow offered his resignation
of the Smith Professorship "of the French and Spanish Languages and
Literatures ... and of Belles Lettres in Harvard College," a post he
had filled since 1836. Seven candidates of no mean ability presented
themselves for the vacant position, but the appointment was offered to
Lowell, who had not applied for it, in preference to them all. He spent
another year abroad before undertaking the work in the autumn of 1856,
and held the position actively until 1877 and as emeritus professor
until his death in 1891. In this work he was a scholar and a critic
rather than a teacher. He gave almost no elementary instruction in the
languages, and his methods with his classes were casual to the neglect
of the usual college traditions. What he did for his students was to
share with them his own broad experience of life and letters and to
show them how the study of foreign literatures was one with the study
of history and philosophy.
Lowell's course of life, however, could never be restricted to any
single channel. If he had found in 1850 that reform could not take
up the whole of him, he now discovered that scholarship was not
all-absorbing. As early as 1853 the question of establishing a new
Boston magazine had been in the air. When its chief promoter, Francis
H. Underwood,[20] had made certain of its start, Lowell was secured as
first editor and carried it through the most critical period, until
in 1861 it passed into the publishing hands of Ticknor and Fields
and under the editorship of the junior member of that firm, James T.
Fields. In the editorial office, as at Cambridge, Lowell was relieved
from the heaviest humdrum labor (especially of correspondence) and
was enabled to give his best energies to creative planning, yet it is
interesting to see how effective were some of the detail criticisms
accepted by poets like Emerson and Whittier and how vigilant he was in
his reading of manuscripts and proof sheets. Throughout it all he kept
up a spring-flow of boyish jollity, no different in spirit from that in
his letters of college days.
[20] See Bliss Perry's "Park Street Papers," "The Editor who Never
was Editor," pp. 205-277.
An unpremeditated bit in one of his letters shows how the mind of
professor and literary editor reverted to the excitement of politics
on the eve of the war. It is in a fragment of burlesque on the type
of love story submitted to the _Atlantic_: "Meanwhile the elder of
the two, a stern-featured man of some forty winters, played with the
hilt of his dagger, half drawing and then sheathing again the Damascus
blade _thin as the eloquence of Everett and elastic as the conscience
of Cass_." From 1858 to 1866 he printed some sixteen vigorous and
substantial political articles, besides many shorter notes and reviews,
and during the latter four years resumed the "Biglow Papers," repeating
and building upon his original success. The aggressive fighting spirit
which he carried into the discussion of definite men and measures did
not blind him to the permanent values of the matters in dispute. The
consequence was that his political writings were limited to the Civil
War only in the facts he cited, and that they apply to any war in
the principles to which he appealed. There is no better illustration
than "Mason and Slidell: a Yankee Idyll." In this the Concord Bridge
and Bunker Hill Monument bring the spirit of the Revolution to the
discussion of a Civil War issue, and between them they utter almost
all the basic contentions of the World War which broke out fifty
years later. They anticipate the vital things that have recently been
said for and against military preparedness, international jealousies,
the changes made necessary in international law by the progress of
invention, the appeals to national hatred and to a tribal or national
God, the viciousness of an indeterminate peace, and the essential
values of democracy.
From this ordeal by battle Lowell seems to have risen into a broader
and nobler serenity. He balanced the prose essay on "The Rebellion: its
Cause and Consequences" with the Harvard "Commemoration Ode"; the next
prose volumes, "Among my Books" (1870 and 1876) and "My Study Windows"
(1871), with the odes on "Agassiz" (1874) and "The Concord Centennial"
(1875) and the "Three Memorial Poems" of 1877. In all the poems he
looked to the past, the struggle being over, for some evidences of
strength and beauty in American life and for some assurances for its
future; and in the literary essays he looked beyond nationalism to the
permanent and universal values in literature. His political writings
had appeared mainly in the _North American Review_, which he had
edited (1864-1872) in coöperation with Charles Eliot Norton; and at
this point younger admirers called him into public appearances as
presiding officer, as committee chairman, as delegate to a Republican
national convention, and as presidential elector. It even took some
insistence to carry through his refusal to run for Congress. Finally,
in 1877 he entered as foreign minister on eight years of the highest
service to his country, the first two and a half at Madrid and the
remainder at London. Few men in America could have equaled him in his
qualifications for the Spanish mission. He had taught the language
and the literature and was especially well-versed in the drama, and
temperamentally there was much in him which responded to the national
character. He wrote to Mr. Putnam, "I like the Spaniards very well as
far as I know them, and have an instinctive sympathy with their want
of aptitude for business"; and to Professor Child, "There is something
oriental in my own nature which sympathizes with this 'let her slide'
temper of the hidalgos." Both of which statements should be taken as
partly true to the letter and partly indicative of the adjustability
which distinguishes the American from the Englishman.
The most compact tribute to his five and a half years at the court of
St. James was the remark of a Londoner that he found all the Britons
strangers and left them all cousins. Lowell was one of the two extreme
types of American whom Victorian England chose to like and admire. One,
of the Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller sort, was free and easy, smacking
of the wild West, completely in contrast with the English gentleman;
the other, in the persons of men like Lowell and Charles Eliot
Norton, was the nearest American approach to cultivated John Bull. In
diplomatic circles Lowell's tact always mollified his firmness, even
leading to criticism from some of his countrymen because he never
defied nor blustered. And in his immensely important appearances as the
representative of the United States at all manner of social occasions,
he charmed his hosts by the grace and pertinence of his public speech.
His speech was the happiest, easiest, most graceful conceivable,
with just the right proportion of play to seriousness, the ideal
combination of ingredients for a post-prandial confection.... He was
pithy without baldness and full without prolixity. He never said too
much, nor said what he had to say with too much gravity. His manner,
in short, was perfection; but the real substance that his felicity of
presentation clothed counted for still more.... And in England his
unexampled popularity was very largely due to this gift.[21]
[21] W. C. Brownell, "American Prose Masters," pp. 271, 272.
In the years remaining to him after his return from London in 1885 he
literally uttered much of the best that he wrote. He was no longer
an eager producer, but he could be stimulated to speak by special
invitations. So he delivered addresses out of the fullness of his
experience at Birmingham University, at Westminster Abbey, at the
celebration of Forefathers' Day in Plymouth, at the 250th Anniversary
of the founding of Harvard, before the reform leagues of Boston and
New York, and at a convention of the Modern Language Association of
America. These, with his last volume of verse, "Heartsease and Rue"
(1888), became his valedictory. He died in 1891.
The outstanding feature of Lowell's career is that he was a poet in
action. His first and last volumes were lyrics. In the forty-seven
years between their issues he was always the artist. He brought his
emotional fervor and his sense of phrase to his essays, addresses, and
occasional poems and to his pursuit of scholarship. His natural first
interests were in the printed page and in the wielding of the pen;
measured by weeks and months his life was largely lived in retirement,
but the step from reading and writing to active citizenship was an
easy one, and in the world of action he seemed to make few waste
motions. What he did not only counted in itself but it enriched
his mind as much as what he read. And back of all his activity were
certain qualities that contributed to his effectiveness. He was a
representative man, a fact acknowledged by his classmates who elected
him their poet. He had the journalistic gift of saying excellently what
others were on the verge of thinking. He did little thinking of his own
that was original but much that was independent, and as a sane radical
he was sure of the hearing he richly deserved. He was clever and
charming, with a glint of errant unexpectedness, which was ingratiating
even when it was far-fetched or even wantonly malapropos. His quips are
like the gifts and favors of old-time children's parties--hidden all
over the house and just as likely to defy search as to turn up under a
napkin or in the umbrella of a departing guest. And behind all, Lowell
was prevailingly American, with the combined trust in democracy and
fear for it that belonged to his group in his generation.
From 1820 on, Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and their followers had protested
more and more frequently (see pp. 111-114) at the certain condescension
in foreigners to which Lowell addressed himself in his essay of 1865.
Yet all these men, and cultured America as a whole, played up to this
condescension and encouraged it by evidently expecting it--stimulating
it by the peevish feebleness of their protests. Lowell, though loyal,
was always apologetic, always hoping to gain confidence in his
countrymen. His intimate friend, Charles Eliot Norton, was deferent
toward all things British or European, and, while working valiantly
to establish sound canons of taste, felt a distress for the crudities
of American life that was only a refinement upon the snobbishness of
the Effinghams in Cooper's "Homeward Bound" and "Home as Found." The
fact is that the refined American of the mid-nineteenth century was
afraid to contemplate the incarnation of America. He knew that Uncle
Sam was too mature for it; he feared that it was like Tom Sawyer; he
did what he could to mold it into the image of Little Lord Fauntleroy;
and he apologized for Whitman. When Mark Twain visited William Dean
Howells in Cambridge in 1871 they were both young sojourners from
what was to Cambridge an undiscriminated West. Young Mr. Clemens did
not care at all, and young Mr. Howells did not care as far as he was
concerned, though he cared a great deal in behalf of his friend, who
was so incorrigibly Western. And in recording his anxiety he recorded a
striking fact of that generation: that American culture was afraid even
of the rough-and-ready Americans whom Europe was applauding. "I did not
care," said Mr. Howells of Mr. Clemens, "to expose him to the critical
edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not have appreciated
him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his popularity was
as instant as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged that for a
much longer time here than in England polite learning hesitated his
praise.... I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think
Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less."[22]
[22] W. D. Howells, "My Mark Twain," p. 46.
In habits of intellectual nicety, in manners, and in social inclination
Lowell was an aristocrat; yet in spite of these tendencies, and quite
evidently in spite of them, he was in principle a stanch democrat,
and when put to the test that sort of democrat is the most reliable.
The conflict is interestingly apparent throughout his writings. The
address on "Democracy" of 1888 need not be gravely cited as proof of
Lowell's belief in government by the people; it is only the final
iteration of what he had all his life been saying. Yet after his usual
leisurely introduction he approached his subject with the smile of
half apology which had become a habit to him: "I shall address myself
to a single point only in the long list of offences of which we are
more or less gravely accused, because that really includes all the
rest." It crops out in the Thoreau essay, apropos of Emerson: "If it
was ever questionable whether democracy could develop a gentleman, the
problem has been affirmatively solved at last"; and in the Lincoln
essay: "Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached with Americanism by some
not unfriendly British critics; but, with all deference, we cannot say
that we like him any the worse for it." In the ode on Agassiz he heaved
a sigh of relief that the great naturalist was willing to put up with
New England conditions; and even in the Harvard "Commemoration Ode" he
broke out suddenly with:
Who now shall sneer?
Who dare again to say we trace
Our lines to a plebeian race?
The point is not in the least that Lowell did not believe in democracy;
every deprecating remark of this sort was prefatory to a fresh defense
of it. The point is that, as with a quarrel, it takes two to make a
condescension and that Lowell did his part. It is difficult to imagine
the young foreigner of "German-silver aristocracy" condescending with
success to Lincoln or Emerson or to Mark Twain or Whitman.
The frequent expression of this self-defensive mood is an illustration
of another leading trait in Lowell--his spontaneity. Since he felt as
he did there would have been no virtue in concealing the fact, and
Lowell seldom concealed anything. He wrote readily and fully, often
beyond the verge of prolixity. He gave his ideas free rein as they
filed or crowded or raced into his mind, not only welcoming those
that came but often seeming to invite those that were tentatively
approaching. Only in a few of his lyrics did he compact his utterance.
Most of the introductions to essays and longer poems proceed in
the manner of the "musing organist" of the first stanza in "Sir
Launfal," "beginning doubtfully and far away," and what follows is
in most cases somewhat lavishly discursive. The consequences of this
manner of expression of a richly furnished mind are not altogether
fortunate. Much of his writing could have been more quickly started
and more compactly stated, and practically all of it could have
been more firmly constructed. Emerson's essays lack firm structure
because they were not written to a program, but were aggregations of
paragraphs already set down in his journals. Lowell's essays, although
deliberately composed, were equally without design. His method was
to fill himself with his subject of the moment and then to write
eagerly and rapidly, letting "his fingers wander as they list." His
productions were consequently poured out rather than built up. They
have the character of most excellent conversation which circles about a
single theme, allows frequent digression, admits occasional brilliant
sallies, includes various "good things," and finally stops without
any definitive conclusion. In this respect, while Lowell was by no
means artless in the sense of being unsophisticated, he was also by no
means artful in the sense of calculating his effects upon the reader.
The only reader of whom he seems to have been distinctly conscious
was the bookish circle of his own associates. He would fling out
recondite allusions as though in challenge, and he wrote in a flowing,
polysyllabic diction which was nicely exact but which rarely would
concede the simpler word.
This same surging spontaneity was both the strength and weakness of his
poetry. He inclined too much to foster the theory of inspiration. "'Tis
only while we are forming our opinions," he once wrote, "that we are
very anxious to propagate them"; and as he indited most of his poems
while he was in this state of "anxiety" they became effusions rather
than compositions. His first drafts, in fact, were fulfillments of
Bryant's injunction in "The Poet":
While the warm current tingles through thy veins
Set forth the burning words in fluent strains.
But in his revisions he was unable to follow the instructions to the
end:
Then summon back the original glow, and mend
The strain with rapture that with fire was penned.
As a consequence his poems when published were as invertebrate as when
he first wrote them, and of the revisions in detail many were shifted
back to their original form. The degree to which he tempered the wind
of self-criticism to his own poetical lambs is the more noteworthy on
account of the acumen with which he commented as editor on the work of
his fellow-poets.
On the other hand, his easy command of versification, his gift of
phrasing, and his rich poetic imagination resulted in very many
passages of beauty and feeling, particularly in the later odes like the
Commemoration and Agassiz poems, into which he poured the fine fervor
of his patriotism. In these his sincerity, his intellectual solidity,
his idealism, and his nature-feeling combined with "the incontrollable
poetic impulse which is the authentic mark of a new poem" and which
Emerson ascribed to him in a journal entry of 1868.
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Author_=
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Works. Riverside Edition. 1890. 11 vols.
Elmwood Edition. 1904. 16 vols. (Contains one more volume of
literary essays, one more of poetry, and the three volumes of
letters. C. E. Norton, editor. 1904.) These appeared in book form
originally as follows: Class Poem, 1838; A Year's Life, 1841;
Poems, 1844; Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 1845; Poems,
Second Series, 1848; A Fable for Critics, 1848; The Biglow Papers,
1848; The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848; Fireside Travels, 1864; The
Biglow Papers, Second Series, 1867; Under the Willows and Other
Poems, 1869; The Cathedral, 1870; Among my Books, 1870; My Study
Windows, 1871; Among my Books, Second Series, 1876; Three Memorial
Poems, 1877; Democracy and Other Addresses, 1887; Political
Essays, 1888; Heartsease and Rue, 1888; Latest Literary Essays and
Addresses, 1891; The Old English Dramatists, 1892; Last Poems,
1895; Impressions of Spain, 1899.
=Bibliography=
A volume compiled by George Willis Cooke. 1906. Cambridge
History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 544-550.
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life is by H. E. Scudder. 1901. 2 vols.
BENTON, JOEL. Lowell's Americanism. _Century_, November, 1891.
BROWNELL, W. C. American Prose Masters. 1909.
CURTIS, G. W. Orations and Addresses, Vol. III. 1894.
GODKIN, E. L. The Reasons why Mr. Lowell should be Recalled.
_Nation_, June 1, 1882.
GREENSLET, FERRIS. Lowell: his Life and Work. 1905.
HALE, E. E. Lowell and his Friends. 1898.
HALE, E. E., JR. Lowell. 1899.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Book and Heart. 1897.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Old Cambridge. 1899.
HOWELLS, W. D. A Personal Retrospect of Lowell. _Scribner's_,
September, 1900.
HOWELLS, W. D. Literary Friends and Acquaintances. 1900.
JAMES, HENRY. Essays in London. 1893.
MABIE, H. W. My Study Fire. _Ser. 2._ 1894.
MEYNELL, ALICE. The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays. 1893.
NORTON, C. E. James Russell Lowell. _Harper's_, May, 1893.
NORTON, C. E. Letters of Lowell. _Harper's_, September, 1893.
SCUDDER, H. E. Mr. Lowell as a Teacher. _Scribner's_, November,
1891.
STILLMAN, W. J. The Autobiography of a Journalist, chap. xiv.
1901.
STODDARD, R. H. Recollections Personal and Literary. 1903.
TAYLOR, BAYARD. Critical Essays. 1880.
THORNDIKE, A. H. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol.
II, Bk. II, chap. xxiv.
UNDERWOOD, F. H. Lowell; a Biographical Sketch. 1882.
UNDERWOOD, F. H. The Poet and the Man. 1893.
WENDELL, BARRETT. Stelligeri. 1893.
WILKINSON, W. C. A Free Lance in the Field of Life and Letters.
1874.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read "The Present Crisis" as determining the temper in which Lowell
wrote his essay on Thoreau in view of their different reactions to the
same national situation.
Read what Poe, Longfellow, and Lowell had to say concerning
overemphasis on the American quality of American literature as noted
on pages 177, 272, and 284. Is there any clear reason for this common
dissent?
Compare the people discussed in Lowell's "Fable for Critics" and in
Poe's "Literati," published within two years of each other.
Read the connecting prose passages between the "Biglow Papers" for
interesting evidence of Lowell's attention to and knowledge of
linguistic detail.
Read "Mason and Slidell: a Yankee Idyll" in "Biglow Papers," Second
Series, as a commentary on the Great European War.
Analyze the structure of a selected long poem and of a literary essay
with a view to studying its firmness or looseness.
Read any one of Lowell's five great odes and note the rhetorical
fitness of meter and subject as contrasted with the artificiality of
Lanier's later poems.
Read "The Shepherd of King Admetus," "Invita Minerva," "The Origin of
Didactic Poetry," and the passages on Lowell and his fellow-poets for
his comments on poetry and poetic art.