19, 1855.
It may be said that he was more known as a minister than as a preacher. There was no branch of ministerial duty in which he did not practically engage. His relations with his people, from the beginning to the end, were those of entire confidence. But it must be understood, while this is said, that he was a highly popular preacher everywhere, and every congregation, as well as that of the West Church, was glad if by any accident of courtesy or of duty he appeared in the pulpit.
The interesting and amusing life by which the children of the family made a world of the gardens of Elmwood was in itself an education. The garden and grounds, as measured by a surveyor, were only a few acres. But for a circle of imaginative children, as well led as the Lowell children were, this is a little world. One is reminded of that fine passage in Miss Trimmers’s “Robins,” where, when the four little birds have made their first flight from the nest into the orchard, Pecksy says: “Mamma, what a large place the world is!” Practically, I think, for the earlier years of James Lowell’s life, Elmwood furnished as large a world as he wanted. Within its hedges and fences the young people might do much what they chose. They were Mary, who was the guardian; then came William; afterwards Robert, whose name is well known in our literature; and then James. The four children were much together; they found nothing difficult, for work or for pastime. Another daughter, Rebecca, was the songstress of the home; with a sweet flexible voice she sang, in her childhood, hymns, and afterwards the Scotch melodies and the other popular music of the day.
The different parts of the grounds of Elmwood became to these children different cities of the world, and they made journeys from one to another. Their elder brother Charles, until he went to Exeter to school, joined in this geographical play.
The father and mother differed from each other, but were allied in essentials; they enjoyed the same tastes and followed the same pursuits in literature and art. Dr. Lowell was intimate with Allston, the artist, whose studio was not far away, and the progress of his work was a matter of home conversation.
Mrs. Putnam told me that in “The First Snowfall” would be found a reference to Lowell’s elder brother William, who died when the poet himself was but five years old; another trace of this early memory appears again in the poem “Music,” in “A Year’s Life.”
To such open-air life we may refer the pleasure he always took in the study of birds, their seasons and habits, and the accuracy of his knowledge with regard to trees and wild flowers.
THE PASTURE, ELMWOOD
In the simple customs of those days, when one clergyman exchanged pulpits with another, Dr. Lowell would drive in his own “chaise” to the parsonage of his friend, would spend the day there, and return probably on Monday morning. He soon found that James was a good companion in such rides, and the little fellow had many reminiscences of these early travels. It would be easy to quote hundreds of references in his poems and essays to the simple Cambridge life of these days before college. Thus here are some lines from the poem hardly known, on “The Power of Music.”
“When, with feuds like Ghibelline and Guelf,
Each parish did its music for itself,
A parson’s son, through tree-arched country ways,
I rode exchanges oft in dear old days,
Ere yet the boys forgot, with reverent eye,
To doff their hats as the black coat went by,
Ere skirts expanding in their apogee
Turned girls to bells without the second e;
Still in my teens, I felt the varied woes
Of volunteers, each singing as he chose,
Till much experience left me no desire
To learn new species of the village choir.”
So soon as the boy was old enough he was sent to the school of Mr. William Wells, an English gentleman who kept a classical school in Cambridge, not far from Dr. Lowell’s house. Of this school Dr. Holmes and Mr. Higginson have printed some of their memories. All the Cambridge boys who were going to college were sent there. Mr. Wells was a good Latin scholar, and on the shelves of old-fashioned men will still be found his edition of Tacitus, printed under his own eye in Cambridge, and one of the tokens of that “Renaissance” in which Cambridge and Boston meant to show that they could push such things with as much vigor and success as they showed in the fur trade or in privateering. A very good piece of scholarly work it is. Mr. Wells was a well-trained Latinist from the English schools, and his boys learned their Latin well. And it is worth the while of young people to observe that in the group of men of letters at Cambridge and Boston, before and after James Lowell’s time, Samuel Eliot, William Orne White, James Freeman Clarke, Charles and James Lowell, John and Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumner, Wentworth Higginson, and other such men never speak with contempt of the niceties of classical scholarship. You would not catch one of them in a bad quantity, as you sometimes do catch to-day even a college president, if you are away from Cambridge, in the mechanical Latin of his Commencement duty.
But though the boys might become good Latinists and good Grecians, the school has not a savory memory as to the personal relations between master and pupils. James Lowell, however, knew but little of its hardships, as he was but a day scholar. Dr. Samuel Eliot, who attended the school as a little boy, tells me that Lowell delighted to tell the boys imaginative tales, and the little fellows, or many of them, took pleasure in listening to the more stirring stories. “I remember nothing of them except one, which rejoiced in the central interest of a trap in the playground, which opened to subterranean marvels of various kinds.”
CHAPTER II
HARVARD COLLEGE
From such life, quite familiar with Cambridge and its interests, Lowell presented himself for entrance at Harvard College in the summer of 1834, and readily passed the somewhat strict examination which was required.
Remember, if you please, or learn now, if you never knew, that “Harvard College” was a college by itself, or “seminary,” as President Quincy used to call it, and had no vital connection with the law school, the school of medicine, or the divinity school—though they were governed by the same Board of Fellows, and, with the college, made up Harvard University. Harvard College was made of four classes—numbering, all told, some two hundred and fifty young men, of all ages from fourteen to thirty-five. Most of them were between sixteen and twenty-two. In this college they studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics chiefly. But on “modern language days,” which were Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, there appeared teachers of French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese; and everybody not a freshman must take his choice in these studies. They were called “voluntaries,” not because you could shirk if you wanted to, for you could not, but because you chose German or Italian or Spanish or French or Portuguese. When you had once chosen, you had to keep on for four terms. But as to college “marks” and the rank which followed, a modern language was “worth” only half a classical language.
Beside these studies, as you advanced you read more or less in rhetoric, logic, moral philosophy, political economy, chemistry, and natural history—less rather than more. There was no study whatever of English literature, but the best possible drill in the writing of the English language.
