LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL (1819-1891), American author and diplomatist, was born at Elmwood, in Cambridge (Mass.), Feb. 22, 1819, the son of Charles and Harriet Lowell. He was brought up near the open country and was early initiated into the reading of poetry and romance—Spenser, Scott, and old ballads. He was a wide reader but a somewhat indifferent student, graduating at Harvard without special honours in 1838. He wrote a number of pieces for the college magazine, and shortly after graduating printed for private circulation his class poem.
After some vacillation he took a course at the Harvard Law School and was admitted to the bar in 184o. He did not care for the law, yet he had little encouragement to trust to writing for self-support. The course of his life was deeply affected by the influence of Maria White, to whom he was betrothed. She was a poet of delicate power, but also possessed a lofty enthusiasm, a high conception of purity and justice, and a practical temper, which led her to concern herself with the temperance and abo lition movements. The first-fruit of this passion was a volume of poems, A Year's Life (1841), which was inscribed by Lowell in a veiled dedication to his future wife. The betrothal, more over, stimulated Lowell to new efforts towards self-support, and, though nominally maintaining his law office, he threw his energy into the establishment, with a friend, Robert Carter, of a literary journal, the Pioneer. It was to open the way to new ideals in literature and art, and the writers to whom Lowell turned for assistance—Hawthorne, Emerson, Whittier, Poe, Story, and Par sons, none of them then possessing a wide reputation—indicate the acumen of the editor. Lowell himself had already turned his studies in dramatic and early poetic literature to account in another magazine, and continued the series in the Pioneer, besides contributing poems; but after the issue of three monthly num bers, beginning in Jan. 1843, the magazine came to an end.
The venture confirmed Lowell in his bent towards literature. At the close of 1843 he published a collection of his poems, and a year later he gathered up certain material which he had printed, sifted and added to it, and produced Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. The book reflects Lowell's interest in reform as well as literature, for the conversations relate only partly to the poets and dramatists of the Elizabethan period ; a slight sug gestion sends the interlocutors off on the discussion of current topics. Just as this book appeared Lowell and Miss White were married. They spent the winter and early spring of 1845 in Philadelphia, where Lowell had a regular engagement as an editorial writer on the Pennsylvania Freeman. In the spring of
1845 the Lowells returned to Cambridge and made their home at Elmwood. On the last day of the year their first child, Blanche, was born; but she, like the third, Rose, died in infancy. A second daughter, Mabel, lived to survive her father. His mother's clouded mind and his wife's frail health, together with a narrow income, conspired to make Lowell almost a recluse in these days. Nevertheless he contributed poems to the daily press, called out by the slavery question; he was, early in 1846, a correspondent of the London Daily News; and in the spring of 1S48 he formed a connection with the National Anti-Slavery Standard of New York, by which he agreed to furnish weekly either a poem or a prose article. The poems were most frequently works of art; occasionally they were tracts; but the prose was almost exclusive ly concerned with the public men and questions of the day, and forms a series of incisive, witty, and sometimes prophetic diatribes. It was a period with him of great mental activity, and is represented by four of his books, which stand as admirable witnesses to the Lowell of 1S48, namely, the second series of Poems, containing among others "Columbus," "An Indian Sum mer Reverie," "To the Dandelion," and The Changeling ;" A Fable for Critics. in which he characterizes in witty verse and with good-natured satire American contemporary writers, in cluding himself ; The Vision of Sir Launfal, one of his most popular poems; and finally The Biglow Papers, which brought him wide fame. The book was not premeditated ; a single poem, called out by the recruiting for the abhorred Mexican War, couched in rustic phrase and sent to the Boston Courier, had the inspiriting dash and electrifying rat-tat-tat of this new recruiting sergeant in the little army of anti-slavery reformers. Lowell himself discovered what he had done at the same time that the public did, and he followed the poem with eight others either in the Courier or the Anti-Slavery Standard. He developed four well-defined characters in the process ; and his stinging satire and sly humour are so set forth in the vernacular of New Eng land as to give at once a historic dignity to this form of speech. (Later he wrote an elaborate paper to show the survival in New England of the English of the early 17th century.) He embroid ered his verse with an entertaining apparatus of notes and mock criticism. Even his index was spiced with wit. The book, a caustic arraignment of the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico, made a strong impression, and the political phil osophy secreted in its lines became a part of household literature.