James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

Mr. Lawrence Lowell, in his interesting memoir of the poet’s life, calls the few years from 1846 to 1850 the most active and the most happy of his life. “His happiness was, indeed, broken by the death of little Blanche, in March, 1847; but a new joy came to him in the birth of another daughter, Rose, toward the close of the year. Both grief and joy, however, seem to have stimulated his poetic feeling, and poems such as ‘The First Snowfall’ and ‘The Changeling’ show the ecstasy to which they brought his nature. During all this period he wrote incessantly, sometimes about public affairs, sometimes from a purely poetic impulse, with no direct relation to the great struggle in which he was engaged, but almost always with a stern sense of his mission as a prophet and a seer. His character no less than his poetic feeling had deepened and strengthened, and poems like ‘The Present Crisis’ attest the full maturity of his powers.”

When Phillips & Sampson established the “Atlantic Monthly,” in the autumn of 1857, he was its first regular editor; and there are some very nice letters of his in which he speaks of the somewhat sudden change in the methods of his daily life which come in as he walks along the river-bank from Elmwood and takes the street-car to the office in Boston. If there were room, I could hardly print anything more interesting than specimens of the notes which he wrote to authors. They give a very pretty picture of the watchful interest which he took in each individual number of the “Atlantic.” It is as the mother of a large family might not let her children go to a Christmas party without seeing that the hands of each one were perfectly clean, and that the collar of each one was prettier and neater than the others’. I think I may say that, in a somewhat varied experience in such matters, I have known no editor who had so close a watchful eye on the detail of the work of his journal.

JAMES T. FIELDS

This connection with the “Atlantic” lasted for four years, when James T. Fields, the prince among editors, took his place. In the year 1863, in company with his very dear friend Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, he became the editor of the “North American Review.” What this meant appears from the fact that between the years 1863 and 1877 he wrote thirty-four “articles” for the “North American,” besides as many more of what, in the language of that day, were called “critical notices.” In the “Atlantic Monthly,” between the years 1857 and 1877, he wrote one hundred and sixteen articles, prose or poetry.

There are, as I have intimated, a great many men now prominent among our men of letters who recollect Lowell gratefully as being the Beatrice who first welcomed them into this Paradise. Without attempting to name half of them, I will say that Mr. Howells, whom he welcomes so cordially in a letter which is to be found in Mr. Norton’s collection, and Mr. Aldrich, to whom I referred just now, both afterwards became editors of the “Atlantic” themselves. In their time they have passed on the welcome which the prince of American poets gave to both of them. And each of them inherited in turn the traditions of the office, as he established them.

The establishment of the “Atlantic Monthly” in the autumn of 1857 proved so fortunate an era in the history of the native literature of America that I may safely give to it a few sentences in these memorials. Lowell’s connection with that magazine enlarged very widely the circle of his friends and the range of his life.

It was, then, two or three years since the little Eden of Boston bookselling had been disturbed in its somnolence to a sudden “new departure,” if we may borrow an admirable phrase from the forgotten times when we had a mercantile marine. This “new departure” was the movement, as of a stork among a world of frogs, instituted by Phillips & Sampson, a new-born firm among booksellers.

The publishing business in Boston felt the wave of their impetuosity. It can hardly be said that the old houses waked from the decorous sleep of many years. But this new publishing house, with manners and customs wholly unknown before, suddenly appeared, to the dumb amazement of the old standbys, and to the delight and amusement of all young America, in the East.

Boston had never earned for itself its distinct position as one of the publishing centres of America. It had inherited that position without earning it. Harvard College, the Boston Athenæum, the American Academy, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England system of lectures, and the great free school system, which gave a liberal education to any boy who would take it,—these, all together, created a circle of authors. They created the “Monthly Anthology,” the “North American Review,” and the “Christian Examiner.” Such men as Bancroft, Prescott, Hildreth, Sparks, the Everetts, Hawthorne, Emerson, and now Lowell, came forward with books which had to be published. The loyalty of the Boston lawyers to their business, of the doctors to theirs, and of the ministers to theirs, had made it necessary that there should be printers and shops where books could be bought and sold. So the importers of English books had become, in a languid way, the publishers of books.