After receiving his degree from Harvard in 1838, Lowell decided upon the law as the profession most suitable for him to follow, for at that time a literary career in the United States held out no assurance of a living, even to the best writers. In the preceding year he had written to his intimate friend Shackford: “I thought your brother Charles was studying law. I intend to study that myself, and probably shall be Chief Justice of the United States.” This modest prediction, however, was not to be fulfilled, for after completing a course at the Harvard Law School in 1840 and practicing with but slight interest and success for two years, he gave up the law for a more congenial occupation.
His letters to his confidants “Shack” and Loring during the years at college show his aspiration to become a poet. He reports from time to time his progress in verse making and comments more or less favorably on his “effusions.” This writing of pottery—as it pleased him to call it—continued with more serious interest after his graduation, so that in 1840 he was ready to publish a volume of verse entitled “A Year’s Life.”
The same year was marked by another event of special importance,—his engagement to Maria White, a young woman who was herself a poet and who was deeply interested in all the movements of thought that were making toward freedom and justice before the Civil War. Her influence upon Lowell was to strengthen greatly his confidence in his own best powers as a man and a poet and to help develop in him the broad, kind democratic feeling for his fellow-men that most endears him to his readers. This growth of the poet’s character seems the more remarkable when it is considered that his father, a Unitarian minister, was a man who, though most generous and well-meaning in his regard for others, was well enough content with conditions in his country to feel little sympathy with the reforms then being urged for securing fuller liberty and equality. In his new enthusiasm Lowell turned away from the influence of his younger days and became devoted to the cause of abolition.
In 1842, after abandoning the law, he founded a magazine, The Pioneer, which, however, was issued only three times. After this unsuccessful venture he went back to his poetry, and late in 1843 published a second volume of verse. In the following year appeared his first critical studies in prose, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. This work, like most of the first book of poems, Lowell found in later life to be unworthy of reprinting.
The income from his writings, though small, was sufficient for him to marry in 1844; and not long after this event he became a regular contributor to the Anti-Slavery Standard. In this appeared the first series of the Biglow Papers, in which, through vigorous prose and verse, largely in the Yankee dialect of Hosea Biglow, he protested against the evils that brought on the Mexican War. The collected numbers of the series were published in 1848 and shared the popularity of two other of Lowell’s greatest works, produced in the same year,—the Fable for Critics and The Vision of Sir Launfal, a beautiful narrative poem filled with the spirit of Christian brotherhood.
It was not long after this that Lowell began to feel that his work as a writer for the abolitionist cause was narrowing in its effect. For “red-hot” reform he had no liking. It seemed to him that the hope of his cause lay not so much in treating others harshly as in living according to the high principles that the reformers professed. “The longer I live,” he wrote, “the more am I convinced that the world must be healed by degrees. I see why Jesus came eating meat and drinking wine and companying with publicans and sinners. He preached the highest doctrine, but he lived the life of other men.... Let us sow the best seed we have ... and convert other men by our crops, not by drubbing them with our hoes or putting them under our harrows.” He decided, then, to take life in a more leisurely way and let the poetic power that he considered his best gift express itself freely.
In 1851, accompanied by his wife and his two children, Lowell visited Europe. The months spent abroad gave him much wished-for opportunities for study and observation, but they were darkened by the death of his son Walter. Close upon this sorrow came the death of Mrs. Lowell in the following year (1853), after the return of the family to Elmwood. From that time for many months the poet could find relief from his keen sense of loss only in his literary work, and in the companionship of his daughter Mabel, the only one of his four children who had lived.
Some lectures on the English poets given at the Lowell institute in 1854-55 found so much favor with the authorities at Harvard College that soon afterward he was appointed to succeed Longfellow as professor of foreign languages and literatures. After a period of study in Europe, he assumed charge of classes at Harvard in 1856, and for sixteen years continued in this work, bringing to it with most remarkable success all the warmth and sincerity and broad scope of his own interest in the subjects that he taught. Not many months afterward he was still further honored by being given the editorship of the newly founded Atlantic Monthly, a position that he held until 1861. The year 1857 was made memorable also by his marriage to Miss Frances Dunlap, a much-valued friend and the governess of his daughter. In 1864 he became joint editor of the North American Review, and in this magazine continued the second series of the Biglow Papers, begun in the Atlantic Monthly, the series in which is expressed his finest power as a poet-patriot. Of the same excellence is the famous Commemoration Ode written for memorial ceremonies held at Harvard College in honor of the students who had fallen during the war. Among other contributions to these periodicals were numerous studies of poets and poetry—essays that rank among the best of their kind. Thus did Lowell prove himself to possess a rare combination of the powers of original composition and of criticism.