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was a Congregationalist minister of Boston, and the family to which he belonged has had a strong representation in Massachusetts. His grandfather, John Lowell, was an eminent jurist, the Lowell Institute of Boston owes its endowment to John Lowell, a cousin of the poet, and the city of Lowell was named after Francis Cabot Lowell, an uncle, who was one of the first to begin the manufacturing of cotton in New England.

Lowell was a student at Harvard, and was graduated in 1838, when he gave a class poem, and in 1841 his first volume of poems, A Year's Life, was published. His bent from the beginning was more decidedly literary than that of any contemporary American poet. That is to say, the history and art of literature divided his interest with the production of literature, and he carries the unusual gift of rare critical power, joined to hearty, spontaneous creation. It may indeed be guessed that the keenness of judgment and incisiveness of wit which characterize his examination of literature have sometimes interfered with his poetic power, and made him liable to question his art when he would rather have expressed it unchecked. In connection with Robert Carter, a littérateur who died before Lowell, he began, in 1843, the publication of The Pioneer, a Literary and Critical Magazine, which lived a brilliant life of three months. A volume of poetry followed in 1844, and the next year he published Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, a book which he did not keep alive, but interesting as marking the enthusiasm of a young scholar, treading a way then almost wholly neglected in America, and intimating a line of thought and study in which he afterward made most noteworthy ventures. Another series of poems followed in 1848, and in the same year The Vision of Sir Launfal. Perhaps it was in reaction from the marked sentiment of his poetry that he issued now a jeu d'esprit, A Fable for Critics, in which he hit off, with a rough and ready wit, the characteristics of the writers of the day, not forgetting himself in these lines :

"There is Lowell, who 's striving Parnassus to climb
With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme;
He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,
But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders;
The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching;
His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,
But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell,
And rattle away till he's old as Methusalem,

At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem."

This, of course, is but a half serious portrait of himself, and it touches but a single feature; others can say better than Lowell's ardent nature showed itself in the series of satirical poems which made him famous, The Biglow Papers, written in a spirit of indignation and fine scorn, when the Mexican War was causing many Americans to blush with shame at the use of the country by a class for its own ignoble ends. The true patriotism which marked these and other of his early poems burned with a steady glow in after years, and illumined poems of which we shall speak presently.

After a year and a half spent in travel, Lowell was appointed in 1855 to the Belles Lettres professorship at Harvard, previously held by Longfellow. When the Atlantic Monthly was established in 1857 he became its editor, and not long

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

after relinquishing that post he assumed part editorship of the North American Review. In these two magazines, as also in Putnam's Monthly, he published poems, essays, and critical papers, which have been gathered into volumes. His prose writings, besides the volumes already mentioned, include two series of Among my Books, historical and critical studies, chiefly in English literature;

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and My Study Windows, including, with similar subjects, observations of nature and contemporary life. During the war for the Union he published a second series of The Biglow Papers, in which, with the wit and fun of the earlier series, there was mingled a deeper strain of feeling and a larger tone of patriotism. The limitations of his style in these satires forbade the fullest expression of his thought and emotion; but afterwards in a succession of poems, occasioned by the honors paid to student-soldiers in Cambridge, the death of Agassiz, and the celebration of national anniversaries during the years 1875 and 1876, he sang in loftier, more ardent strains. The interest which

readers have in Lowell is still divided between his rich, abundant prose, and his thoughtful, often passionate verse. The sentiment of his early poetry, always humane, was greatly enriched by larger experience; so that the themes which he chose for his later work demanded and received a broad treatment full of sympathy with the most generous instincts of their time, and built upon historic foundations. His delightful excursions in the field of nature in prose were paralleled by even more delicate rescripts of nature in verse.

In 1877 Lowell went to Spain as Minister Plenipotentiary. In 1880 he was transferred to England as Minister Plenipotentiary near the Court of St. James. His duties as American Minister did not prevent him from producing occasional writings, chiefly in connection with public events. Notable among these are his address at the unveiling of the statue of Fielding, and his address on Democracy.

He returned to the United States in 1885, and the rest of his life was passed quietly in his Cambridge home, his impaired health preventing the accomplishment of much literary work. In 1888, however, he published a collection of his later poems under the title Heartsease and Rue, and in 1890 finished a careful revision of his complete works, which were issued in ten volumes.

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BIRTHDAY VERSES.

WRITTEN IN A CHILD'S ALBUM.

'T WAS sung of old in hut and hall
How once a king in evil hour
Hung musing o'er his castle wall,
And, lost in idle dreams, let fall
Into the sea his ring of power.

Then, let him sorrow as he might,
And pledge his daughter and his throne
To who restored the jewel bright,
The broken spell would ne'er unite;
The grim old ocean held its own.

Those awful powers on man that wait,
On man, the beggar or the king,
To hovel bare or hall of state

A magic ring that masters fate

With each succeeding birthday bring.

Therein are set four jewels rare :
Pearl winter, summer's ruby blaze,
Spring's emerald, and, than all more fair,
Fall's pensive opal, doomed to bear
A heart of fire bedreamed with haze.

To him the simple spell who knows
The spirits of the ring to sway,
Fresh power with every sunrise flows,
And royal pursuivants are those
That fly his mandates to obey.

But he that with a slackened will
Dreams of things past or things to be,
From him the charm is slipping still,
And drops, ere he suspect the ill,
Into the inexorable sea.

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'TIS a woodland enchanted!

By no sadder spirit

Than blackbirds and thrushes,
That whistle to cheer it
All day in the bushes,
This woodland is haunted:
And in a small clearing,
Beyond sight or hearing
Of human annoyance,
The little fount gushes,
First smoothly, then dashes
And gurgles and flashes,

To the maples and ashes
Confiding its joyance;
Unconscious confiding,
Then, silent and glossy,
Slips winding and hiding
Through alder-stems mossy,
Through gossamer roots
Fine as nerves,

That tremble, as shoots

Through their magnetized curves

The allurement delicious

Of the water's capricious

Thrills, gushes, and swerves.

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