James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

I have already spoken, in one connection or another, of the professors to whom Lowell was most closely drawn,—with one or two exceptions. Dr. Asa Gray, the distinguished chief of botany in America, made his home a centre of all that was charming and interesting in the delightful circle of Cambridge society. Nothing could be more interesting than the simplicity of the spirited conversation of this most learned man, and the ease with which, while he really knew almost everything that was worth knowing, he spoke, with utter absence of effect or visible erudition. Where a working gardener would tell you with delight that this or that plant was the “Tomfoolaria eruditissima,” Gray would say, “Oh! that’s one of those Australian sandworts.” When he was still as fresh and cheerful as a boy, I heard him say, “It is great fun to be seventy years old. You do not have to know everything.”

Another of his colleagues who gave distinction to the college, in America and in Europe, was the late Josiah Parsons Cooke, whose position as a teacher and in the ranks of original students in chemistry is so well known.

Lowell’s own charming poem to Agassiz will be recalled by every one who cares for his life at Harvard. Not long after Agassiz had been invited from Switzerland to lecture before the Lowell Institute, he was appointed to a professorship in Cambridge, and he accepted the appointment. He lived in Cambridge from that time until he died, loving and beloved, in 1873. Mr. John Amory Lowell, the cousin of our Lowell, in his plans for the Lowell Institute, engaged Louis Agassiz to deliver one of their courses in 1847. His arrival in America may be spoken of as marking an era in education. Indeed, if the Lowell Institute had never done anything else for America than it did when it “imported Agassiz,” it would have a perpetual claim for our gratitude. With his arrival there was ended, once and forever, the poor habit of studying Nature through the eyes of other observers. Men learned again the lesson which makes them see where they look. For it may be fairly said that Agassiz created here the school of original study which has for a generation past directed the progress of natural science in America. I believe I ought to say that the phrase “imported Agassiz,” which I have ventured to quote, is Lowell’s own. In his address at the Quarter-Millennial of the college he had the hardihood to say that Harvard had not yet developed any first-rate educator, “for we imported Agassiz.”

LOUIS AGASSIZ

I have never forgotten the enthusiasm of Agassiz’s audience the first time I ever heard him. His subject was the First Ascent of the Jungfrau, the maiden mountain which had never been scaled by man until Agassiz led the way. He told us, with eager memory, of all the preparations made for what men thought the hopeless invasion of those untrodden snows, of the personnel of the party, of their last night and early morning start at some encampment halfway up; and then, almost step by step, of the sheer ascent at the last, until, man by man, one after another, each man stood alone, where two cannot stand together, on that little triangle of rock which is the summit. “And I looked down into Swisserland.” As I heard him utter these simple words of triumph, I said that Mr. Lowell might take credit to himself for bringing before our audience the noblest and best specimen, so far discovered, of that greatest species of mammalia—long studied, but as yet little known—of the very finest type, from the widely scattered genus of the race of MAN.

The simplicity of Agassiz’s mode of address captivated all hearers. He put himself at once in touch with the common-school teachers. He had none of that absurd conceit which has sometimes parted college professors from sympathetic work with their brothers and sisters who have the first duty, in the district and town schools, in the infinite work of instruction and education.

Agassiz’s Cambridge life brought into Cambridge a good many of his European friends, and broke up the strictness of a village coterie by the accent, not to say the customs, of cosmopolitan life. To say true, the denizens of the forest sometimes intermixed closely with the well-trained European scholars. There used to be a fine story of a dinner-party at Dr. Arnold Guyot’s when he lived at Cambridge. An admiring friend had sent Guyot as a present a black bear, which was confined in the cellar of his house. Another friend had sent him a little barrel of cider, which was also in the cellar. As the dinner went on upstairs, ominous rumblings were heard below, and suddenly an attendant rushed in on the feast, announcing that the bear had got loose, had been drinking the cider, had got drunk, and was now coming upstairs. The guests fled through windows and doors. I am not sure that Lowell was one of them, but the anecdote belongs in notices of his friends.

I should not dare speak of a “village coterie,” nor intimate that at Cambridge there were men who had never heard of Fujiyama, or of places, indeed, not twenty miles away, but that these anecdotes belong a generation and more ago.