BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

ABOUT half a mile from the Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the road leading to the old town of Watertown, is Elmwood, a spacious square house set amongst lilac and syringa bushes, and overtopped by elms. Pleasant fields are on either side, and from the windows one may look out on the Charles River winding its way among the marshes. The house itself is one of a group which before the war for independence belonged to Boston merchants and officers of the crown, most of whom refused to take the side of the revolutionary party. Tory Row was the name given to the broad winding road on which the houses stood. Large farms and gardens were attached to them, and some sign of their roomy ease still remains. The estates fell into the hands of various persons after the war, and in process of time Longfellow came to occupy and later to own Craigie House. Elmwood at that time was the property of the Reverend Charles Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston; and when Longfellow thus became his neighbor, James Russell Lowell was a junior in Harvard College. He was born at Elmwood February 22, 1819; he died at the same place August 12, 1891.

He was named for his father's maternal grandfather, and was the youngest of a family of five, two daughters and three sons. His father at the time of Lowell's birth was thirty-seven years old and lived till 1861. His son has drawn his portrait in a letter to C. F. Briggs, written in 1844: "He is Dr. Primrose in a comparative degree, the very simplest and charmingest of sexagenarians, and not without a great deal of the truest magnanimity." It was characteristic of Lowell thus to find a prototype of his father in literature. The Lowells traced their descent from Percival Lowell, -a name which survives in the family, — of Bristol, England, who settled in Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1639. The great-grandfather of James Russell Lowell was a minister in Newburyport, one of those, as Dr. Hale says, "who preached sermons when young men went out to fight the French, and preached sermons again in memory of their death, when they had been slain in battle." The grandfather was John Lowell, a member of the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts in 1780. It was he who introduced into the Bill of Rights a phrase from the Bill of Rights of Virginia, "All men are created free and equal," with the purpose which it effected of setting free every man then held as a slave in Massachusetts. A son of John Lowell and half-brother of the Rev. Charles Lowell was Francis Cabot Lowell, who gave a great impetus to New England manufactures, and from whom the city of Lowell took its name. Another son, and thus also an uncle of the poet, was John Lowell, Jr., whose wise and far-sighted provision gave his native city that important centre of intellectual influence, the Lowell Institute.

The mother of the poet, Mrs. Harriet Spence Lowell, a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was of Scotch origin. She is described as having "a great memory, an extraordinary aptitude for language, and a passionate fondness for ancient songs and ballads." It pleased her to fancy herself descended from the hero of one of the most famous ballads, Sir Patrick Spens. In a letter to his mother, written in 1837, Lowell says: "I am engaged in several poetical effusions, one of which I have dedicated to you, who have always been the patron and encourager of my youthful muse." The Russell in his name seems to intimate a strain of Jewish ancestry; at any rate Lowell took pride in