James Russell Lowell 1819-1891 Lowell was one of the few authors to achieve first rank in several departments. His poetry is most exquisite in sentiment, often keen and witty, and always abounding in beautiful expressions; as a critic he was at times caustic and severe, but he showed so clear a grasp of his subject and spoke in such a fearless way with evidence of such profound scholarship that his writings exerted great influence. He was a diplomat who could win such credit at the court of Spain that he was transferred to England, and as Minister to the Court of St. James he handled our foreign relations with such consummate skill and was so popular with the British in a social way that his departure for America caused universal regret. He was the son of a clergyman and was educated at Harvard, practiced law in Boston, and had his life-long home in the house his father had owned, Elmwood, in Cambridge. Keenly intellectual by nature he drew his associates from the most cultivated people and became a man of scholarly tastes and refined manners. The home in which he lived was situated in the midst of groves several acres in extent where the great variety of trees, the luxuriant shrubbery and For flowering plants, gave refuge to many varieties of birds and other forms of animal life. these he had the warmest love, and birds and flowers appear again and again in all his writings. No one has seemed to have a keener insight into nature or more skill in putting into attractive form the results of his observations. He sees everything with a poet's eye and the simplest facts are clothed in choicest phrase. Sorrow came to him early in his married life and his feelings are poured forth in those beautiful lyrics She Came and Went, The First Snow Fall and the Changeling. Then his wife died and again his grief resulted in the production of two poems of matchless beauty, After the Burial and The Dead House. The same night that Lowell's wife died a child was born to Longfellow, who touchingly alluded to the striking contrast in The Two Angels. Lowell and Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes, all sons of clergymen, with Whittier, Bryant, and Taylor, have by their spotless characters, high motives and the purity of their writings given a tone to American literature of this century that has been surpassed by no other epoch here or abroad. Home and country, ties of kindred and of friendship, nature and her inspiration, God and his love have been their themes, and the race is the nobler for their having lived. The brilliancy of their work has been in no way dimmed by their adherence to right and their blameless lives. They have demonstrated that the wretched lives of other men of genius have been a blemish upon the pages of history and that the success of the others has been in spite of their errors and not because of them. Lowell's writings are peculiarly keen and witty, and one of the unique productions of the age is his Biglow Papers in which through the medium of the Yankee dialect, in poetry and prose, he speaks his mind on the slavery question and the two wars in which it embroiled us. Cutting sarcasm and keen ridicule characterize many of the papers while often there is an outburst of sentiment as touching as it is unexpected. These stanzas in which he laments the death of his nephews, lost in the Rebellion, are fine examples: 66 Rat-tat-tat-tattle thru the street I hear the drummers makin' riot, An' I set thinkin' o' the feet Thet follored once an' now are quiet,White feet ez snowdrops innercent, That never knowed the paths o' Satan, Whose comin' step ther''s ears thet won't, No, not lifelong, leave off awaitin'. Why, hain't I held 'em on my knee? |