XII JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL REFERENCES WORKS: Riverside Edition, II vols., Boston: Houghton, 1890-92; Poetical Works, Cambridge Edition, 1 vol., Boston: Houghton, 1896; Last Poems, ed. C. E. Norton, Boston: Houghton, 1895; Letters, ed. C. E. Norton, 2 vols., New York: Harper, 1894. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: H. E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell: A Biography, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1901; E. E. Hale, James Russell Lowell and His Friends, Boston: Houghton, 1899; Wendell, Stelligeri, 205-217; Stedman, Poets of America, Chapter ix. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Foley, 180-187; *Scudder's Life, II, 421-447. SELECTIONS: *Carpenter, 363-382; Duyckinck, II, 661-663; Griswold, Poets, 566–572; Hart, Contemporaries, IV, Nos. 9, 15; Stedman, 202-218; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VII, 411–448. IN 1854 Longfellow resigned the Smith professorship at Life. Harvard College. The next year JAMES RUSSELL LowELL (1819-1891) was appointed his successor. Up to this time Lowell's career, though more limited than Longfellow's, had been similar. He was born at Cambridge, the son of a Unitarian minister whose church was in Boston. In 1838 he took his degree at Harvard; he studied law; but he found this profession distasteful, and his true interest was in letters. For fifteen years before his appointment to the Smith professorship, he had been professionally a literary man. From this time on, for a full twenty-two years, his ostensible profession became what Longfellow's had been from 1836 to 1854, and Teaching. Ticknor's, from 1817 to 1835,—the teaching of modern languages and literature to Harvard undergraduates. The different tasks to which the successive Smith professors addressed themselves might once have seemed a question of different personalities; to-day they seem rather a question of developing American culture. Ticknor's business was to introduce to New England a fresh range of learning; and accordingly his most characteristic publication was the comprehensive, accurate, unimaginative History of Spanish Literature (1849). When, after twenty years, Longfellow succeeded him, America knew modern literature by name, but, except perhaps for Bryant's translations, hardly more. Thus it became Longfellow's task to make pupils enjoy excursions into that limitless world of modern literature which for America was still newly discovered. In 1855, when Lowell came to his work, the conditions had altered again. The main facts of modern literature had become familiar; and the New England Renaissance had greatly stimulated general reading. To the generation with which Lowell came to his maturity, the great modern masters-Spenser and Shakspere, Dante and Cervantes and Goethe-were thus as freshly delightful as the old Greeks had been to the culture of fifteenth-century Italy. Modern literature had been discovered, it had been enthusiastically explored, and now came the task of understanding it. So as a college teacher, and as a critical writer too, Lowell's professional task was interpretative. The eminence which finally made Lowell a national figure came not from his teaching, but from the social accomplishment with which from 1877 to 1885 he filled the office of United States minister, first to Spain and later to detail and Impres England. This fact that Lowell's eminence came late Sense of in life is characteristic. Throughout his career, as man of Inconof letters and as teacher alike, he had been at once helped gruous and hindered by peculiarities of temperament conquer- sions. able only by the full experience of a slow maturity. Born and brought up in Cambridge, when Cambridge was still a village, he was familiar with the now vanished country folk of old New England. From youth he was passionately fond of general reading, in days when this led no Yankee away from sound literature. Though impatient of minute scholarship, too, he possessed one of the most important traits of a minute scholar: by nature he was aware of detail in every impression, and careful of it in every expression. What truly interested him, to be M.Lowell sure, in life and in books alike, were the traits which make books and life most broadly human. In his effort to understand humanity, however, he was incessantly hampered There were for him by his constitutional sense of detail. The fact that Lowell was constantly sensitive to incompatible impressions was not his only temperamental obstacle. The well-known circumstance that he was unable satisfactorily to revise his writing indicates how completely he was possessed by each of his various moods, which ELMWOOD, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., BIRTHPLACE OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. often chased one another in bewildering confusion, yet again left him for prolonged intervals in what seemed to him states of hopeless stagnation. Throughout this uncertainty, however, one can feel in his literary temper two constant, antagonistic phases. His purity of taste, particularly as he grew older, approached Longfellow's. Yet all the while he was incessantly impelled to whimsical extravagance of thought, feeling, and utterance. The trait appears in his fondness for cramming his published essays with obscure allusions to unheard of oddities in the byways of literature and history. If one took these seriously, they would be abominably pedantic. In fact, however, this mannerism was only a rather juvenile prank. Life puzzled Lowell, and in revenge Lowell amused himself by puzzling the people he talked to or wrote for. It is no wonder that this paradoxical conflict between purity of taste and mischievous extravagance of temper retarded his maturity. Lowell's temperament, again, involved somewhat unusual sensitiveness to the influences which from time to time surrounded him. Early in life he married a woman remarkable alike for charms and for gifts, who was enthusiastically devoted to the 'reforms then in the air. It was partly because of her influence, apparently, that Lowell for a while proved so hot-headed a reformer. After her premature death this phase of his temper became less evident. It was revived, of course, by the passionate days of civil war, when he upheld extreme Northern sentiments with all his might; and the depth of his experience finally resulted in the "Commemoration Ode," which chiefly entitles him to consideration as a serious poet. Yet this ode itself, though quickly written and little revised, is marked rather by exceptionally sustained seriousness of feeling than by anything which seems simply, sensuously passionate. One of the traits for which you must search Lowell's volumes long is lyrical spontaneity. Lowell was a man of deep, but constantly various and whimsically incongruous, emotional nature, whose impulse to expression was constantly hampered by all manner of importunate external impressions. For all this, the chances are that, like Longfellow, Low ell would have been apt to consider himself most seriously as a poet; and certainly his poems most clearly express his individuality. His first volume of verse appeared in |