In the old manor-house of Elmwood in Cambridge, close to what is now
mount Auburn Cemetery, our finest representative man of letters, James
Russell Lowell, was born and bred. His father and his grandfather before
him lived here, the former a Unitarian clergyman of the old school, well
read, earnest, somewhat narrow, but an essentially religious man. His
mother was a gifted woman, and a woman of high culture for those days.
She read foreign languages, was a musician, and a woman of high
breeding, and she stamped her own individuality strongly upon at least
three of her children.
The house is a large three-story structure, built of wood, and is
eminently picturesque. The tone of the rooms is sombre, and the
furniture is antique and solid. Nearly everything remains as it was in
the poet's childhood; although the study has been removed from the
second floor to two connected rooms on the first, spacious and
impressive, and lined with well-selected books. The poet has lived in
this house throughout his entire life,--a thing which seldom happens to
an American citizen. In the hall are ancestral portraits, a stately
Dutch clock, and the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Lowell taken by Page in
their youth. The grounds about Elmwood have been kept as nearly as
possible in a state of nature. They are ample, and filled with
magnificent trees. The elms of Cambridge are among the most beautiful to
be found anywhere, and on this estate, though not very numerous, there
are fine specimens. In front of the house are splendid ash-trees, and a
thick hedge of trees surrounds the whole enclosure. This hedge bristles
with pines, droops with willows, and is overtopped by gigantic
horse-chestnuts. Near the house are pines, elms, lilacs, syringas; and
at the back, apple and pear trees. Huge masses of striped grass light up
the thick turf here and there; and all over the grounds the birds,
unmolested from time immemorial, build and sing in perfect freedom and
content. Long ago Longfellow sang of the herons of Elmwood, and they are
still to be found in the wooded slopes behind the house, where the
Lowell children played in their happy childhood.
Mr. Lowell entered Harvard College in his sixteenth year, and, though
never what was called a brilliant student, was graduated in due time,
and entered upon the study of law. He passed through the usual course
and took his degree of LL. B., but he was not noted for his love of
study in the law school, more than in college. He was noted for his love
of reading in both places, but it was of books outside the established
course. His literary bent was strongly marked from the first, and his
poetic talent developed itself at an early day. When only twenty-two
years of age he published his first volume of poems, much like the
youthful poems of other bards, and far inferior to the work of Bryant at
the same age. Three years later he put forth a volume of verses much
more worthy of his genius, some of them being favorites still,--like the
"Shepherd of King Admetus," "The Forlorn," "The Heritage," which
achieved the immortality of the school-books, and a few others.
There was not a large sale for books of poetry in this country at that
time, and these first ventures of Lowell fared much like other books of
that day. If he was not quite as badly off as poor Thoreau, who, a year
after his first thousand was printed, wrote to a friend that he was now
the owner of a library of about a thousand volumes, over nine hundred of
which he wrote himself, he certainly was not far ahead of that original
writer in the matter of sales. His books, however, attracted some
attention, and could hardly be classed under the head he proposes for
certain books, in the "Fable for Critics," namely, "literature suited to
desolate islands,"--
"Such as Satan, if printing had then been invented,
As the climax of woe would to Job have presented."
Mr. Lowell was married in 1844 to Miss Maria White, of Watertown near
Cambridge, the lady to whom some of his first poems were addressed, and
who was herself a writer of very sweet and tender verse. Mrs. Lowell was
most beautiful and accomplished, a fit wife for a poet, and the maker of
a restful but inspiring home. Beautiful children came to them to gladden
their lives for a little season; but all except one were recalled in
early infancy, and the grief of the parents was both acute and lasting.
Many a time, as he tells us, he--
"looked at the snow-fall,
And thought of the leaden sky
That arched o'er our first great sorrow
When that mound was heaped so high."