JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL CHAPTER I THE YOUTH OF A POET 1819-1839 PERHAPS one may no more fitly begin the narrative of so fine yet so complex a life as Lowell's than by taking for his scripture his author's own ideal of biographical method and propriety. “I fancy an honest man," says Lowell in one place, "easier in his grave with the bare truth told about him on his headstone." Yet even a short biography, we may hope, is not precisely a headstone, and even for it "the bare truth is not quite enough. Writing in 1886 to Mr. Charles Eliot Norton concerning some of the difficulties that beset a biographer of Carlyle, Lowell himself put this with characteristic vigor: "The main ingredient a biographer should contribute is sympathy (which includes insight). Truth is not enough, for in biography, as in law, the greater the truth sometimes the greater the libel." In a lecture upon Chapman delivered the same year he protests with a curious warmth of feeling against the gossips of biography, and lays down this suggestive article of biographical orthodoxy : "Of course, in whatever the man himself has made a part of the record we are entitled to find what intimations we can of his genuine self, of the real man, veiled under the draperies of convention and circumstance, who was visible for so many years, yet perhaps never truly seen, obscurely known to himself, conjectured even by his intimates, and a mere name to all beside." There is little comfort here for the Mr. Gigadibses of biography, and even less for Paul Pry with his artless pencil; yet for a biographer of the third generation, wishing to write a "biography of the mind" of a man whom he never saw, it is reassuring. In this narrative of Lowell's life and study of his genius there will be little occasion to adduce any piece of "bare truth" that the man himself in his essays, his poems, and his letters has not made a part of the record. When we endeavor to add to our portrait of his personality some analysis of the things that elemented it, we shall have perforce to turn 1 1 A man's private letters are a doubtful part of his "record," but when edited by so dear and discreet a friend as Mr. Norton, they may be reasonably so considered. to other records than his own, to follow faint clues and indirections from the lips and pens of others. Here again he would be a headstrong biographer, who- being familiar enough with Lowell's personality to bring any sympathy to its portrayal could so run counter to the charm and potency of it as to use his gleanings of external fact in any other spirit than that foreshadowed in the texts set down above. 1. Influences of Childhood. Few poets and for almost the half of his life our author was pure poet-ever came upon the world's stage among more fit surroundings than James Russell Lowell: few have been more tenacious of home. Elmwood, the old house in which he was born and in which he was to die, was always for him the shrine and sanctuary of his deepest sentiment. Even to-day one cannot pass attentively through its wide rooms, and look from its windows, without seeing a greater part of the visible and material symbols about which Lowell's poetic imagination most habitually played. It is, therefore, not for nothing that the names of Lowell and Elmwood have come to have a certain mystic alliance in the minds of all American readers. The house was built, some years before the Revolution, for Thomas Oliver, who had inherited a fortune made in the West Indian trade, and married the daughter of Colonel John Vassall, one of the Royalist grandees of Cambridge. Oliver, who was something of an amateur poet, must have had a pretty eye for landscape, as well as a nice sense of the things that make for comfort and dignity in a dwelling. He chose his site upon the slow-winding thoroughfare known as Tory Row, now Brattle Street, a mile from Harvard College, the geographical and social centre of the town of Cambridge. The house was reared three square stories high, comfortably facing southeast by east; and, for the further frustration of the keen New England blasts, with blind walls of brick to the west and north. From the front windows one looked over the lane that led to the highway, across a stretch of pasture land, to the clustering elms and prim spires of the college town. On the right the smooth-sliding, circuitous Charles slipped through brown salt meadows to the sea. A mile back from its further shore the low curve of Corey's Hill gave a special touch of character to the view. Behind the house, a ten minutes' walk distant, lay the picturesquely bayed Fresh Pond, and beyond that stretched the wooded hills of Belmont and Arlington, and the pine-margined pastures of Lexington. Thomas Oliver, however, was soon compelled |