1813, until his sudden death, 23 November, 1814, a man personally liked, but politically detested by his neighbors. In 1818 the estate, or rather the homestead and some ten acres of land, was sold by Gerry's heirs to the Rev. Charles Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston, who now made it his home, establishing himself there with his wife and five children. In the next year his youngest child, James Russell Lowell, was born in this house of many memories.

The Rev. Charles Lowell was the seventh in descent from Percival Lowell, or Lowle, as the name sometimes was written, a well-to-do merchant of Bristol, who, with children and grandchildren, a goodly company, came from England in 1639, and settled in Newbury, Mass.1 Charles Lowell's father, the Hon. John Lowell, had led a distinguished career as a lawyer and publicist; and as a member of the corporation of Harvard College, and of learned societies having their headquarters in Boston, had been a conspicuous figure in the community. One of his sons, Francis Cabot Lowell, was the organizer of the industries on the banks of the Merrimac which resulted in the building of the city of Lowell. A son of Francis Cabot Lowell was the originator of the Lowell Institute, a centre of diffusing light in Boston. Charles Lowell himself, springing from a stock which, by inheritance and accumulation of intellectual forces, was a leading family in the compact community of Boston, was endowed with a singu1 See Appendix A, The Lowell Ancestry.

larly pure and gracious spirit, and enjoyed an unusual training for the life of rich service he was to lead.

Graduated at Harvard in 1800, his bent was toward the ministry; but yielding to the wishes of his father, he entered the law office of his elder brother, and spent a year or more in the study of the profession of law. His inclination, however, was not changed, and his father withdrew his opposition and consented to a plan by which the young man was to pursue his theological studies in Edinburgh. He had three years of study and travel abroad. He was a pupil of Sir David Brewster and of Dugald Stewart, and kept up a friendly acquaintance for many years with Stewart's later colleague, Dr. Brown. He met Wilberforce, heard Pitt, Fox, and Sheridan in the House of Commons, and, as his letters show, made eager incursions into the world of art.

He carried through all his experience a nature of great simplicity and of unquestioning faith. His son once wrote of him: "Nothing could shake my beloved and honored father's trust in God and his sincere piety;" and his work as pastor of the West Church in Boston, to which he was called shortly after his return to America, was characterized by a single-minded devotion which made him, in the truest sense, a minister. All who have recorded their recollections of him agree in their impression of great distinction of manner and a singularly musical voice. He had a way, it was said, of uttering very familiar sentences, such as a

quotation from the Bible, with singular effectiveness, a manner which was peculiarly his own. After infirmities of sight and hearing had made his appearance in the pulpit rare, he would still, now and then, take part in the service by reciting in his melodious voice one or more of the hymns - he knew by heart all in the book. Emerson said of him that he was the most eloquent extemporaneous speaker he had ever heard. He had the natural gift of speech, but until one read by himself some sermon to which he had listened with delight, he would scarcely be aware that the spell lay in the pure tones of the voice that uttered it.1

Above all, he was the parson, making his powers tell less in preaching than in the incessant care and cure of souls. In Edinburgh he had studied medicine as well as theology, and, as his church stood on the border of a district which was forlorn and unwholesome, Dr. Lowell was constantly extending the jurisdiction of his parochial authority, carrying the gospel in one hand and bread and pills in the other. He knew every child in his

1 In 1853 Dr. Lowell contemplated the publication of a volume of sermons, and his then associate, Dr. Bartol, wrote privately to the son, discouraging the venture. He had not the heart openly to oppose Dr. Lowell. "I know," he writes, "I can trust you to understand me fully when I say it is my persuasion and that of true and strong friends of your father in the parish, that a volume could never overtake his actual reputation, that what is best in him, his voice, his look, his manner, himself, cannot be printed, and that his peculiar glory is one that should scarcely be touched with ink." There did appear, however, in 1855 a volume by Dr. Lowell, entitled Sermons; chiefly Occasional.

parish, and if, as he said, his ministry was an unclouded one, it was because he was too busy with the needs of others ever to perplex himself greatly over his own cares. Indeed, it was the unremitting performance of his pastoral duties which impaired his health and led to the necessity of his removal from the city to the outskirts of the country village of Cambridge, four miles away, though doubtless he was largely influenced also by the needs of the growing family that surrounded him.

Dr. Lowell had seen something of the great world abroad, and he stood in an amiable relation to that self-centred, comfortable world of New England which held to the established order, even though there had begun within it already the agitation which was to shake the nation. Like many thus poised, he hated slavery in the abstract, but shrank back when it became a question of meddling with it: the instinct for the preservation of an established order was strong. The "abolitionism" which he saw rising was to him "harsh, dogmatic, uncharitable, unchristian," and it disturbed his gentle, orderly nature. From the sheltered nook of Elmwood, he looked out on a restless, questioning world, but his own part seemed to be marked out for him. He had his parish, with a thousand petty disorders to rectify; he had his books, which he loved and read; he drove to town in his chaise to attend the meetings of the Historical Society, of which he was long secretary, and he watched the chickens and growing things in his green domain of Elmwood. The tall pines which

murmur about the old house were planted by him. He brought to the solution of the new problems which were vexing men the calm religious philosophy which had solved any doubts he may have had, and if his equanimity was disturbed he righted himself always with a cheerful optimistic piety. One of his parish who had grown to womanhood under his eye, and had married, made up her mind to take a stand in some reform as a public speaker, and from his chamber at Elmwood-for this was late in his life, when he was in retirement he sent for her to come to him.

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"I shall never forget his greeting," she wrote long after. "As I opened the chamber door he rose from the old easy-chair, and standing erect, cried out: Child! my child! what is this I hear? Why are you talking to the whole world?' He was clothed in a long white flannel dressing-gown, with a short shoulder cape hardly reaching to his belt. His was no longer the piercing expression, aggressive to a degree, that Harding has portrayed. The curling locks that gave individuality to his forehead had been cut away, the gentle influence of a submissive spirit had impressed itself upon his features. In a moment I was seated at his feet, and then came a long and intimate talk of why and when and wherefore, which ended in a short prayer with his hand upon my head, and the words, 'Now promise me that you will never enter the desk without first seeking God's blessing!' I answered only by a look." 1

1 Alongside, by Mrs. Caroline H. Dall. Privately printed.