Poems of James Russell Lowell / With biographical sketch by Nathan Haskell Dole

NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. PUBLISHERS

In the year 1639 Percival Lowle, or Lowell, a merchant of Bristol, England, landed at the little seaport town of Newbury, Mass.
We generally speak of a man's descent. In the case of James Russell Lowell's ancestry it was rather an ascent through eight generations. Percival Lowle's son, John Lowell, was a worthy cooper in old Newbury; his great-grandson was a shoemaker, his great-great-grandson was the Rev. John Lowell of Newburyport, the father of the Hon. John Lowell, who is regarded as the author of the clause in the Massachusetts Constitution abolishing slavery.
Judge Lowell's son, Charles, was a Unitarian minister, learned, saintly, and discreet. He married Miss Harriet Traill Spence, of Portsmouth,—a woman of superior mind, of great wit, vivacity, and an impetuosity that reached eccentricity. She was of Keltic blood, of a family that came from the Orkneys, and claimed descent from the Sir Patrick Spens of the grand old ballad. Several of her family were connected with the American navy. Her father was Keith Spence, purser of the frigate Philadelphia, and a prisoner at Tripoli.
By ancestry on both sides, and by connections with the Russells and other distinguished families, Lowell was a good type of the New England gentleman.
He was born on the 22d of February, 1819, at Elmwood, not far from Brattle Street, Cambridge.
Lowell's early education was obtained mainly at a school kept nearly opposite Elmwood by a retired publisher, an Englishman, Mr. William Wells. He also studied in the classical school of Mr. Danial G. Ingraham in Boston. He was graduated from Harvard College in the class of 1838. He is reported as declaring that he read almost everything except the class-books prescribed by the faculty. Lowell says, in one of his early poems referring to Harvard,—
Tho' lightly prized the ribboned parchments three, Yet collegisse juvat , I am glad That here what colleging was mine I had.