JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
From a daguerreotype taken at Philadelphia in 1844
Lowell was ready to give himself to the side of freedom with his pen or with his voice. At this time he engaged in the service first of the “Liberty Bell,” an anti-slavery annual published in Boston, and afterwards of the “National Anti-Slavery Standard.” Mrs. Lowell also wrote for both journals.
The “Standard” was a weekly journal of great originality and ability, published in New York under the auspices of one of the national anti-slavery societies. The editor was Sydney Howard Gay, afterwards so distinguished as a historian, and holding all his life the most important trusts as a journalist in New York. He worked with Bryant in the “Evening Post.” He worked with Greeley in the “Tribune.” It is not too late to hope that his memoirs will be collected and published. They will throw a flood of light on points not yet fully revealed in the history of the twenty years which led up to the fall of Richmond and the emancipation of America.
Most organs, so called, of a special philanthropy are narrow and bigoted, and so, by the divine law which rules narrowness and bigotry, are preëminently dull. Witness most missionary journals and all temperance journals, so far as this writer has observed. We owed it to Gay, I suppose, that the “Anti-Slavery Standard,” while pitiless in its denunciation of slavery, was neither narrow, bigoted, nor dull. Lydia Maria Child’s letters from New York, which were published in it once a week, are still remembered among editors. They give an ideal type for writing in that line, in a series of papers which may well be studied by young journalists, for, though often imitated, they have never been equaled. They are the despair of “leading editors” who try to get such work done for them and never succeed.
Lowell engaged himself to write regularly for the “Standard,” and did so for some years. His prose papers in that journal have never been collected, but they would be well worth collection. And the poems he wrote at this time, sometimes political, but not always so, generally appeared in the “Standard.” The headquarters of the young people were now at Elmwood in Cambridge. Here their oldest children were born, and here their oldest child died. It was then that Maria Lowell wrote that charming poem which has been read with sympathetic tears in so many homes from which “the Good Shepherd” has called away one of his lambs.
I have often heard it said that the “Biglow Papers,” which followed soon after, introduced Lowell in England, and I suppose it was so. You never can tell what they will like in England, or what they will not like. But this is clear, that, having little or no humor of their own, they are curiously alive for humor in others. And the dialect of the “Biglow Papers,” which is no burlesque or exaggeration, but simply perfect New England talk, is in itself curious enough and suggestive enough to have introduced letters on any theme.
Literary people in England still fancied that they were opposed to the principle of slavery, as, in truth, a considerable number of them were. And between the outspoken abolitionists of America and those of England there was then a freemasonry tender and charming, though sometimes absurd and amusing. I suppose this first introduced the Biglow letters, with their rollicking fun, their absolute good sense and vigorous suggestions, into England. Once introduced, they took care of themselves, and went wherever there were readers of sense or even intelligence. They began in a spurt of fun about a little local passage in Massachusetts politics.
“Fer John P.
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