LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| PAGE | |
| [James Russell Lowell] | [Frontispiece] |
| From a photograph by Gutekunst taken in 1889. | |
| [Rev. Charles Lowell] | [10] |
| From a painting by Rand, in the possession of Charles Lowell. | |
| [James Russell Lowell in 1843] | [116] |
| From the painting by William Page, in the possession of James B. Lowell. | |
| [Mrs. Charles Lowell] | [306] |
| From a painting by Rand, in the possession of James Duane Lowell. | |
| [Mrs. Maria White Lowell] | [360] |
| From a drawing by Cheney, after a painting by William Page. | |
| [House of Dr. Estes Howe, Cambridge] | [384] |
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
CHAPTER I
ELMWOOD AND THE LOWELLS
James Russell Lowell was born at Elmwood in Cambridge, New England, Monday, 22 February, 1819. When he was about to leave England at the close of his term as American minister, he was begged by a friend to make Washington his home, for there he would find the world in which lately he had been living; but he answered: “I have but one home in America, and that is the house where I was born, and where, if it shall please God, I hope to die. I shouldn’t be happy anywhere else;” and at Elmwood he died, Wednesday, 12 August, 1891.
The place was endeared to him by a thousand memories, and he liked it none the less for the historic associations, which lent it a flavor whimsically suggestive to him of his own lurking sympathy. “It will make a frightful Conservative of you before you know it,” he wrote in 1873 to Mr. Aldrich, then living at Elmwood; it was born a Tory and will die so. Don’t get too used to it. I often wish I had not grown into it so.”