JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
AND HIS FRIENDS
CHAPTER I
HIS BOYHOOD AND EARLY LIFE
One cannot conceive more fortunate or charming conditions than those of the boyhood and early education of James Russell Lowell. You may study the babyhood and boyhood of a hundred poets and not find one home like his. His father, the Rev. Charles Lowell, was the minister of a large parish in Boston for more than fifty years. Before James was born, Dr. Lowell had moved his residence from Boston to Cambridge, to the home which his children afterwards called Elmwood. So much of Mr. Lowell’s poetry refers to this beautiful place, as beautiful now as it was then, that even far-away readers will feel a personal interest in it.
The house, not much changed in the last century, was one of the Cambridge houses deserted by the Tory refugees at the time of the Revolution. On the steps of this house Thomas Oliver, who lived there in 1774, stood and heard the demand of the freeholders of Middlesex County when they came to bid him resign George the Third’s commission. The king had appointed him lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts and president of the council. But by the charter of the province councilors were to be elected. Thomas Oliver became, therefore, an object of public resentment. A committee of gentlemen of the county waited on him on the morning of September 2, 1774, at this house, not then called Elmwood. At their request he waited at once on General Gage in Boston, to prevent the coming of any troops out from town to meet the Middlesex yeomanry. And he was able to report to them in the afternoon that no troops had been ordered, “and, from the account I had given his Excellency, none would be ordered.” The same afternoon, however, four or five thousand men appeared, not from the town but from the country—“a quarter part in arms.” For in truth this was a rehearsal for the minute-men’s gathering of the next spring, on the morning of the battle of Lexington. They insisted on Oliver’s resignation of his commission from the crown, and he at last signed the resignation they had prepared, with this addition: “My house at Cambridge being surrounded by five thousand people, in compliance with their command, I sign my name.”
But for Thomas Oliver’s intercession with General Gage and the Admiral of the English fleet, the English troops would have marched to Cambridge that day, and Elmwood would have been the battleground of the First Encounter.
The state confiscated his house after Governor Oliver left for England. Elbridge Gerry, one of the signers of the Declaration, occupied it afterward.
Readers must remember that in Cambridge were Washington’s headquarters, and that the centre of the American army lay in Cambridge. During this time the large, airy rooms of Elmwood were used for the hospital service of the centre. Three or four acres of land belonged to the estate. Since those early days a shorter road than the old road from Watertown to Cambridge has been cut through on the south of the house, which stands, therefore, in the midst of a triangle of garden and meadow. But it was and is well screened from observation by high lilac hedges and by trees, mostly elms and pines. It is better worth while to say all this than it might be were we speaking of some other life, for, as the reader will see, the method of education which was followed out with James Russell Lowell and his brothers and sisters made a little world for them within the confines, not too narrow, of the garden and meadow of Elmwood.
In this home James Russell Lowell was born, on the 22d of February, 1819. There is more than one reference in his letters to his being born on Washington’s birthday. His father, as has been said, was the Rev. Charles Lowell. His mother before her marriage was Harriet Spence, daughter of Mary Traill, who was the daughter of Robert Traill, of Orkney. They were of the same family to which Minna Troil, of Scott’s novel of “The Pirate,” belongs. Some of us like to think that the second-sight and the weird fancies without which a poet’s life is not fully rounded came to the child of Elmwood direct by the blood and traditions of Norna and the Fitful Head. Anyway, Mrs. Lowell was a person of remarkable nature and accomplishments. In the very close of her life her health failed, from difficulties brought on by the bad food and other exposure of desert travel in the East with her husband. Those were the prehistoric days when travelers in Elijah’s deserts did not carry with them a cook from the Palais Royal. But such delicate health was not a condition of the early days of the poet’s life.
His mother had the sense, the courage, and exquisite foresight which placed the little boy, almost from his birth, under the personal charge of a sister eight years older. Mrs. Putnam died on the 1st of June, 1898, loving and beloved, after showing the world in a thousand ways how well she was fitted for the privileges and duties of the nurse, playmate, companion, philosopher, and friend of a poet. She entered into this charge, I do not know how early—I suppose from his birth. I hope that we shall hear that she left in such form that they may be printed her notes on James’s childhood and her care of it.
ENTRANCE TO ELMWOOD
Certain general instructions were given by father and mother, and under these the young Mentor was largely left to her own genius and inspiration. A daily element in the business was the little boy’s nap. He was to lie in his cradle for three hours every morning. His little nurse, eleven or twelve years old, might sing to him if she chose, but she generally preferred to read to him from the poets who interested her. The cadences of verse were soothing, and so the little boy fell asleep every day quieted by the rhythm of Shakespeare or Spenser. By the time a boy is three years old he does not feel much like sleeping three hours in the forenoon. Also, by that time this little James began to be interested in the stories in Spenser, and Mrs. Putnam once gave me a most amusing account of the struggle of this little blue-eyed fellow to resist the coming of sleep and to preserve his consciousness so that he might not lose any of the poem.
Of course the older sister had to determine, in doubtful cases, whether this or that pastime or occupation conflicted with the general rules which had been laid down for them. In all the years of this tender intimacy they never had but one misunderstanding. He was quite clear that he had a right to do this; she was equally sure that he must do that. For a minute it seemed as if there were a parting of the ways. There was no assertion of authority on her part; there could be none. But he saw the dejection of sorrow on her face. And this was enough. He rushed back to her, yielded the whole point, and their one dispute was at an end. The story is worth telling, if only as an early and exquisite exhibition of the profound affection for others which is at the basis of Lowell’s life. If to this loving-kindness you add an extraordinary self-control, you have the leading characteristics of his nature as it appears to those who knew him earliest and best, and who have such right to know where the motives of his life are to be found.
I am eager to go on in some reminiscences of the little Arcadia of Elmwood. But I must not do this till