James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

FRANCIS JAMES CHILD

How well fitted Mr. Child was for these positions his published series of ballads and other works show. His recent death gives me a right to speak here of the tender love with which he was regarded by all the Cambridge circle, and of the unselfish interest with which he gave time and work to the help of all around him. One is glad to see this interest surviving in the lives of his children.

I am not sure that this story of those days is quite decorous enough for print. But I will risk it. Professor Calvin Ellis Stowe, who was a classmate of Longfellow’s, told me that in the early days of ’61 he met Longfellow in the streets of Boston. Both of them were in haste, but Longfellow had time enough to ask if the Andover gentlemen were all alive to their duty to the nation. Stowe said he thought they were, and Longfellow said, “If the New Testament won’t do, you must give them the Old.” Professor Stowe told me this in August of 1861, after the anniversary exercises of the class at Andover. The division between Rehoboam and Jeroboam had naturally played a very important part in the chapel exercises, with the obvious distinction that in our time it was the North which was in the right and the South which was in the wrong.

I am permitted to copy the following scraps from the journal of one of Lowell’s pupils at that time:—

“In ’64, when I had come back from a service mostly civil, but under direction of General Saxton, on Port Royal Islands, I had to give the college steward a bond to secure whatever dues I might incur. Lowell volunteered to sign the bond, and to say that he had perfect confidence in me. December 22 he called at Divinity Hall, to invite me to a five o’clock Christmas dinner; again on Christmas to turn the hour into four o’clock. The other guests were John Holmes and Caroline Norton, a young man and a niece of the host. Each man was impressed into escort duty to a woman, and I was Mabel’s escort to the table.

“The dinner and the chat were delightful. Holmes and Lowell sharpened their wits upon each other, while the rest of us ate and laughed. I was the only obdurate that would not take a smile of wine. After dinner we were entertained with some of Blake’s curious pictures, with snowflake shapes, and with books. Lowell had been ’weeding his back garden,’ and he offered me the little stock of duplicates and obsoletes: a Webster’s quarto dictionary was one of the books, and the evening was Christmas; but the boys had a notion that his income was almost pinchingly small for a man in his place; so, in the hope that he might second-hand them off for five or ten dollars, I declined them, and have been sorry ever since. I should have known that if he wanted to sell them he would not even have shown them to me, and that he did want to put them where they would be helpful and well used.”

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1860)

I might almost say that such daily associations with the war account for the form and spirit alike of the “Commemoration Ode.” No one who was present when that ode was delivered can forget the occasion. It was in every regard historical. Peace was concluded, and the country drew a long breath with joy for the first time. An immense assembly of the graduates came together. As many of them as could filed into the church for religious services. Under the lead of Mr. Paine, the professor of music, a college chorus sang “Salvam fac rempublicam.” I think this was the first time that the music now well known was used for those words. On such occasions at Cambridge the graduates entered the church in the order of their seniority. I remember that on that occasion the attendance was so large that my own class, which was twenty-six years out of college, were among the last persons who could enter the building. We stood in the aisles, because there were no seats for us.