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tising literature in the way of poetical and prose contributions to the magazines, that he was roused out of his dreams by the prick of necessity in the sudden loss by his father of much of his property, and by the impulse given to his own moral force by the coming into his life of Maria White. He became engaged to this lady in the fall of 1840, and the next twelve years of his life were profoundly affected by her influence. Herself a poet of delicate power, she brought an intelligent sympathy with his work; it was, however, her strong moral enthusiasm, her lofty conception of purity and justice, which kindled his spirit and gave force and direction to a character which was ready to respond and yet might otherwise have delayed active expression. They were not married until 1844, but they were not far apart in their homes, and during these years Lowell was making those early ventures in literature, and first raids upon political and moral evil, which foretold the direction of his later work, and gave some hint of its abundance.

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In 1841 he collected the poems which he had written and sometimes contributed to periodicals into a volume entitled A Year's Life, and inscribed in a veiled dedication to his future wife. In hopes of bettering his fortune, and in obedience to the instinct which most young men of letters have, he undertook with Robert Carter the publication of a literary journal, The Pioneer, which died under their inexperienced hands with the third number, but in those had printed contributions by Lowell, Hawthorne, Whittier, Story, Poe, and Dr. Parsons, a group which it would be hard to match in any of the little magazines that hop across the world's path to-day. He began also to turn his studies in dramatic and early poetic literature to account, and, after printing a portion of them in Nathan Hale's Miscellany, published, in 1844, Conversations on some of the Old Poets. He did not keep this book alive; but it is interesting as marking the enthusiasm of a young scholar treading a way then almost wholly neglected in America, and indicating a line of thought and study in which he afterwards made most noteworthy venture. In the same year he again collected his poetic work into a volume of Poems. The difference between the two volumes of poems, though separated by three years only, is marked. Few of the verses from A Year's Life are included in the poet's final collection of his writings, few are omitted from Poems. One poem in the earlier volume, Irené, is conspicuous as a poetic portrait of the figure of peace which had come into his somewhat turbulent spiritual life; but the volume as a whole is characterized by vague sentimentalism and restless beating of half-grown wings. Three years later, some of this same immaturity is discoverable, but along with the poems which wander in somewhat unmeaning ways are those spirited adventures like "Rhocus," "The Shepherd of King Admetus," and "Prometheus," which denote the growing consciousness of positive poetic power, and also those stirring Sonnets to Wendell Phillips and J. R. Giddings, and the lines entitled "A Glance behind the Curtain," which disclose a new passion leaping up as the champion of truth and righteousness. It is noticeable, too, that in the first volume there is no trace of humor and scarcely any singular felicity of phrase; in the second, wit and humor begin to play a little on the surface. In Conversations, where the familiar form gives freer scope, there is a gayety of speech which intimates the spontaneity of the man and anticipates the rich fruitage of later years. In all these books, however, there is good evidence of the rapid growth which was taking place in Lowell's intellectual and moral life, a coming to his own which it would take only some strong occasion to make

sure.

This occasion was the Mexican War, with the greater contest which flamed up with it over the encroachments of slavery. Lowell and his wife, who brought a fervid antislavery temper as part of her marriage portion, were both contributors to the Liberty Bell,

and Lowell was a frequent contributor to the Antislavery Standard, and was indeed for a while a corresponding editor; but in June, 1846, there appeared one day in the Boston Courier a letter purporting to be from Mr. Ezekiel Biglow of Jalaam to the Hon. Joseph T. Buckingham, editor of the Boston Courier, enclosing a poem of his son, Mr. Hosea Biglow. It was no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam Slick had been notable examples, and they had many imitators; but the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea's poem and caught the gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was in with the appearance of something new in American literature. A score of years afterward, when introducing the Second Series of The Biglow Papers, Lowell confessed that when he wrote this letter and poem he had no definite plan, and no intention of ever writing another. It was struck out from him by the revolt of his nature at the iniquity of slavery and the war into which slavery was dragging the nation. But he adds, "The success of my experiment soon began not only to astonish me, but to make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a weapon, instead of the mere fencing stick I had supposed. . . . If I put on the cap and bells, and made myself one of the court fools of King Demos, it was less to make his Majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain serious things which I had deeply at heart."

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The Biglow Papers not only gave Lowell to himself and opened the flood gates of his patriotism and his noble indignation; they gave him a public, and thus furnished the complement which every author demands. Very far," he says, in the same Introduction, "from being a popular author under my own name, so far, indeed, as to be almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere; I saw them pinned up in workshops; I heard them quoted and their authorship debated." The force which he displayed in these satires made his book at once a powerful ally of a sentiment which heretofore had been ridiculed; it turned the tables and put Antislavery, which had been fighting sturdily on foot with pikes, into the saddle, and gave it a flashing sabre. For Lowell himself it won an accolade from King Demos. He rose up a knight, and thenceforth possessed a freedom which was a freedom of nature, not a simple badge of service in a single cause. His patriotism and moral fervor found other vents in later life, and he never laid down the sword which he then took up, but it is significant of the stability of his genius that he was not misled by the sudden distinction which came to him into a limitation of his powers. It was shortly after this that he wrote, in one of those poetic absences from his every-day life, which were to overtake him more than once afterward, his Vision of Sir Launfal; and the exuberance of his nature, together with his keen power of criticism, found expression about the same time in his witty Fable for Critics, in which he hit off, with a rough and ready wit, the characteristics of the writers of the day, not forgetting himself in these lines :

There is Lowell, who 's striving Parnassus to climb
With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme ;
He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,
But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders;
The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching;
His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,
But he 'd rather by half make a drum of the shell,
And rattle away till he 's old as Methusalem,
At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem.

This, of course, is but a half serious portrait of himself, and it touches but a single feature. A third volume of Poems appeared in the same year, 1848, as the last named. A year in Europe, 1851-52, with his wife, whose health was then precarious, stimulated his scholarly interests, and gave substance to his study of Dante and Italian literature. In October, 1853, his wife died; she had borne him four children: the first-born, Blanche, died in infancy, as did the second, Rose; the third, Walter, also died young; the fourth, a daughter, Mrs. Burnett, survived her parents. In 1855 he was chosen successor to Mr. Longfellow as Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures, and Professor of Belles Lettres in Harvard College. He spent two years in Europe in further preparation for the duties of his office, and in 1857 was again established in Cambridge and installed in his academic chair. He married also at this time his second wife, Miss Frances Dunlap, of Portland, Maine.

Lowell was now in his thirty-ninth year. As a scholar, in his professional work, he had acquired a knowledge of the Romance languages and was an adept in Old French and Provençal poetry; he had given a course of twelve lectures on English Poetry before the Lowell Institute in Boston which had made a strong impression on the community; and his work on the series of British Poets in connection with Professor Child, especially his biographical sketch of Keats, had been recognized as of a high order. In poetry he had published the volumes already mentioned. In general literature he had printed in magazines the papers which he afterward collected into his volume Fireside Travels. Not long after he entered on his college duties The Atlantic Monthly was started, and the editorship given to him. For the details of the office he had little aptitude, although he looked keenly after nice points of literary finish in the proof-reading; he was relieved of much of the detail by his active assistant, Mr. F. H. Underwood, to whom the inception of the magazine was largely due. But the Atlantic afforded a good outlet for his literary production, and though he held the editorship but a little more than two years he stamped the magazine with the impress of his high ideals in literature and criticism; his selection of articles was judicious, his own contributions and criticism were full of life, and he was most generous in his critical aid to contributors. In 1862 he was associated with Mr. Charles Eliot Norton in the conduct of The North American Review, and continued in this charge for ten years. Much of his prose was contributed to this periodical.

These twenty years, from 1857 to 1877, were the most productive period of Lowell's literary activity. He was in the maturity of his mental power, he held a convenient position in University life, his home relations were congenial and stimulating, and his collegiate work, as well as his editorial charge successively of the Atlantic and North American, gave him a needed impulse to literary effort. During this period appeared the most of that body of literary history and criticism which marks him as the most distinguished of American critics. Any one reading the titles of the papers which comprise the volumes of his prose writings will readily see how much literature, and especially poetic literature, occupied his attention. Shakespeare, Dryden, Lessing, Rousseau, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, Keats, Carlyle, Percival, Thoreau, Swinburne, Chaucer, Emerson, Pope, Gray, - these are the principal subjects of his prose, and the range of topics indicates the catholicity of his taste. These papers are the rich deposit of a mind at once sympathetic and discriminating, capable of enjoying to the full the varied manifestations of life in literature, and combining judicial fairness with keen eritical insight.

While this broad stream of literary criticism was flowing, there was another expression

of Lowell's nature, never divorced from this love of letters, a criticism of life, especially as it took form in contemporaneous American history. The period which I have named covered the preparation for the war for the Union, that war itself, and the reconstruction era afterward, and the expression of Lowell's nature in its attitude toward the whole period was manifold. The volume of Political Essays contains the incisive papers which stung the irresolute and time-serving, and inspirited the ardent lovers of truth and liberty. It is impossible to read these papers now without admiration for the political sagacity of the writer, -a sagacity before the event, not after. Every page bears witness to the sanity with which he regarded contemporaneous affairs, when madness seemed the most natural temper in the world, and his insight of human nature was that of a poet who did not regard his power of vision as excluding the necessity of paying taxes. History has been supplying foot-notes to these pages, with the result, not of correcting the text, but of confirming it.

In this same period also he wrote and published the Second Series of The Biglow Papers, and used his satire and his moral indignation with a depth of feeling which surpassed that shown in the first series, a little to the detriment thereby, it may be, of the gaiety of the humor. In truth, strong as was Lowell's power of invective, his passion of patriotism found this vent too narrow; there was a large, constructive imagination at work on the great theme of national life, which found fuller expression in the Odes which the Centennial and Commemorative occasions called out. Lowell seized these occasions with a spirit which scarcely needed them, and merely employed them as fit opportunities for casting in large moulds the great thoughts and feelings which rose out of the life of a man conscious of his inheritance in a noble patrimony.

It was at the close of this period, in which he had done incalculable service to the Republic, that Lowell was called on to represent the country, first at Madrid, where he was sent by President Hayes in 1877, and afterwards at London, to which he was transferred in 1880. He had a good knowledge of Spanish language and literature when he went to Spain, but he at once took pains to make his knowledge fuller and his accent more perfect, so that he could have intimate relations with the best Spanish men of the time. In England he was at once a most welcome guest, and a most effective public speaker. Eight years were thus spent by him in the foreign service of the country. His sole participation in practical politics, as the term is, up to this time had been to attend a national convention once as delegate, and to have his name used as Presidential Elector. To the minds of many of his countrymen he seemed doubtless a dilettante in politics. Special preparation in diplomacy he had not, but he had what was more fundamental, a large nature enriched by a familiar intercourse with great minds, and so sane, so sound in its judgment, that whether he was engaged in determining a reading in an Elizabethan dramatist or in deciding to which country an Irish colossus belonged, he was bringing his whole nature to the bench. No one can read Lowell's despatches from Madrid and London without being struck by his sagacity, his readiness in emergencies, his interest in and quick perception of the political situation in the country where he was resident, and his unerring knowledge as a man of the world. Nor could Lowell lay aside in his official communications the art and the wit which were native to him. "I asked Lord Lyons," he writes in one letter," whether he did not think suzerainty might be defined as 'leaving to a man the privilege of carrying the saddle and bridle after you have stolen his horse.' He assented."

But though Lowell's studies and experience had given him a preparation for dealing with diplomatic questions, the firmness with which he held his political faith afforded as

sure a preparation for that more significant embassy which he bore from the American people to the English. Not long after his return he published a little volume containing the more important speeches which he had made while in England. Most of them had to do with literature, but the title-address in the volume, Democracy, was an epigrammatic confession of political faith as hopeful as it was wise and keen. A few years later he gave another address to his own countrymen on "The Place of the Independent in Politics." It was a noble apologia, not without a trace of discouragement at the apparently sluggish movement of the recent years, but with that faith in the substance of his countrymen which gave him the right to use words of honest scorn and warning. What impresses one especially in reading this address, remembering the thoughtless gibes which had been flung at this patriot, is the perfect self-respect with which he defines his position, the entire absence of petty retaliation upon his aspersers, the kindliness of nature, the charity, in a word, which is the finest outcome of a strong political faith. It must have been galling to Lowell to find himself taunted with being un-American. He could afford to meet such a charge with silence, but he answered it with something better than silence when he reprinted in a volume his scattered political essays.

The public life of Mr. Lowell made him more of a figure before the world. He received honors from societies and universities; he was decorated by the highest honors which Harvard could pay officially, and Oxford and Cambridge, St. Andrews and Edinburgh, and Bologna, gave gowns. He established warm personal relations with Englishmen, and after his release from public office he made several visits to England. There, too, was buried his wife, who died in 1885. The closing years of his life in his own country, though touched with domestic loneliness and diminished by growing physical infirmities that predicted his death, were rich also with the continued expression of his large personality. He delivered the public address in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University, he gave a course of lectures on the Old English Dramatists before the Lowell Institute, he collected a volume of his poems, he spoke and wrote on public affairs, and the year before his death revised, rearranged, and carefully edited a definitive series of his writings in ten volumes. Since his death three small volumes have been added to his collected writings, and Mr. Norton has published Letters of James Russell Lowell in two volumes.

For anything like an adequate apprehension of Lowell's rich nature, the reader unacquainted with him during his lifetime, needs to read these Letters and the whole body of his prose and poetry; a nature at once so spontaneous and so lavish of its best gifts is not to be bounded by the arbitrary limits of a biography, brief or extended. Yet the poems alone as contained in this volume do much to reveal to the attentive reader the personality of their author. He was the most companionable of men, and shared his large gifts with chance acquaintance so freely that one sometimes wondered what he saved for more intimate friends; and yet his fine reserve was apparent even to those who knew him best. The humor which underlies so much even of his stately verse was a constant quantity in his temperament, closely allied with shrewd sagacity; the sentiment and fancy which find expression sometimes in an entire poem, more often in phrase and line, played about his conversation in familiar intercourse; but as his verse when read in its fulness is charged with noble passion and with an imagination in which human experience and personal emotion are fused in a high ideal, so no one could long be with the poet without recognizing that he was in the presence of a character which combined the unflinching earnestness of the Puritan with the mellowness of a man of the great world. H. E. S.

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