JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1819-1891 LOWELL has been fitly called the most representative American man of letters. He was more sensitive to the life that was throbbing about him than any of his contemporaries, and he reflected this life more fully in his writings. When he was an undergraduate at Harvard, Emerson was rising into fame, and Lowell in his class poem satirized him and the other reformers of the day; and yet Lowell later on was to come into sympathy with these same reformers. His early verse, too, reflects the sentimentality with which Willis and his contemporaries had charged the literary atmosphere. Then came the first Biglow Papers, with their indignation against the Mexican War, and later the second series, near the close of the Civil War, which gave voice, with mingled bitterness and humor, to the determined attitude of the North. Again, in 1875, there breathes through one of his odes, Under the Old Elm, the spirit of reconciliation and of magnanimous praise for the valor of the defeated. Lowell, too, as successor of Longfellow in the chair of modern languages at Harvard, fitly represented the academic side of American letters. In his later years, as an advocate of reform in political life, and as the representative of the nation at the Court of St. James, in London, he finally emerges as a national public figure, and becomes, in his essays and addresses, an interpreter to the Old World of the ideals of American democracy. The early surroundings of Lowell's life were peculiarly fortunate. He was born at “Elmwood," an old colonial house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had been used as a hospital for wounded soldiers after the battle of Bunker Hill. He came of sound New England stock, with a sprinkling of ministers and lawyers in his family line. His father was the Rev. Charles Lowell, minister of a church in Boston. He was graduated from Harvard in 1838, and then went through the law school, but soon gave up the law for literature. His first volume poems appeared three years after graduation, and this was followed by several other volumes, at intervals, through a long series of years. In 1844 Lowell married Miss Maria White, a young woman of literary gifts, who was also intensely interested in all the reforms that were then in the air. It is often asserted that Lowell, always susceptible to surrounding influences, was led by his wife to join the antislavery move of ment, but it is more than likely that it was his strong humanitarian impulses which drew him into this struggle. For a time he worked on an antislavery newspaper in Philadelphia, but soon returned with his wife to his father's house at Cambridge. Here, however, he continued to write for antislavery and other journals. In 1846 there began to appear in the Boston Courier his Biglow Papers, written in the up-country Yankee dialect, and satirizing the motives which are supposed to have led to the Mexican War. These satires were well received by the public, and Lowell had now made a promising start as a professional man of letters. A series of successful lectures delivered in Boston at the Lowell Institute, an institution founded by his cousin, led to his appointment, in 1855, as Longfellow's successor as Smith professor of modern languages at Harvard. During the years that he held this professorship, he edited, at different times, both the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, and he published volumes of verse and literary essays; but his most important literary production during this time was the second series of The Biglow Papers, which dealt with the Civil War. The years that followed The Biglow Papers were the most fruitful years of Lowell's life. In 1865 he wrote a noble ode in commemoration of the Harvard men who fell in battle; and, in 1875, he wrote Under the Old Elm, celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of Washington's taking command of the American army at, Cambridge. In this ode he showed himself too broadly patriotic to cherish any of the animosity bred by the Civil War. Lowell's greatest opportunity came in 1880, when, after serving for three years as minister to Spain, he was transferred to the Court of St. James in London. His character broadened and his talents ripened during these years of diplomatic service. He developed, rather to the surprise of his friends, into a wise, witty, and wholly effective public speaker. He was in special demand in England for after-dinner speeches, and for occasional literary and political addresses. His address on Democracy was a clear-sighted and forceful presentation to an English audience of the ideals of democratic America. Its freedom from boastfulness, its plain recognition of dangers, its calm hopefulness for the future, mark Lowell as a remarkably intelligent and well-poised American citizen of the great world. On his return to America, in 1885, Lowell settled down quietly among his books and friends at Cambridge. But he interested himself in the independent movement in politics which sprang up during the presidential campaign of 1884, a movement to reform the civil service, and to elevate the tone of public life. He had ceased to be a strict party man, because the day of intense partisanship had passed. During the few remaining years of his life, he was, like Bryant before him, commonly regarded as the first citizen of the Republic. As an American man of letters, Lowell's place seems secure in the first group; but critics are not of one mind as to his relative position in this group. He lacks Emerson's intellectual steadiness and imaginative reach; he has not Longfellow's supreme good taste and gift of simple melody; and he is far behind Poe in perfection of form and in lyric power. But there are two qualities that Lowell possessed in a high degree, — patriotic fervor and a sense of humor. Both of these qualities find abundant expression in The Biglow Papers. In the commemoration odes there is the spirit of elevated and sustained patriotism. Humor sparkles through the whimsical Fable for Critics, and is found in many of his prose essays, notably in the one On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. Finally, then, Lowell, while not our greatest writer, is our most representative man of letters, since his writings reflect so variously the experiences of his generation; and he was, moreover, a greater citizen than any of his literary contemporaries. WHAT IS SO RARE AS A DAY IN JUNE? FROM THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL FOR a cap and bells our lives we pay, And what is so rare as a day in June? And over it softly her warm ear lays; 5 10 Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The cowslip startles in meadows green, The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean To be some happy creature's palace; The little bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, And lets his illumined being o'errun With the deluge of summer it receives; And whatever of life hath ebbed away 5 10 15 20 Into every bare inlet and creek and bay; 25 We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing 30 The breeze comes whispering in our ear, That dandelions are blossoming near, That maize has sprouted, that streams are flowing, That the river is bluer than the sky, That the robin is plastering his house hard by; 35 And if the breeze kept the good news back, We could guess it all by yon heifer's lowing, THE COURTIN' GOD makes sech nights, all white an' still All silence an' all glisten. Zekle crep' up quite unbeknown An' peeked in thru the winder, An' there sot Huldy all alone, 'ith no one nigh to hender. A fireplace filled the room's one side There warn't no stoves (tell comfort died) To bake ye to a puddin'. The wa'nut logs shot sparkles out Towards the pootiest, bless her, An' leetle flames danced all about The chiny on the dresser. Agin the chimbley crook-necks hung, The ole queen's-arm thet gran'ther Young The very room, coz she was in, Seemed warm f'om floor to ceilin', 5 10 15 20 25 |