THE Lowells are descended from Perci tures. His son, John Lowell, Jun., who died at the age of thirty-seven, left a bequest of $250,000 to establish the Lowell Institute, in Boston. The father of the poet was Dr. Charles Lowell, an eminent clergyman (1782-1861); his grandfather, John Lowell (1743-1802), was an eminent judge, and the author of the section in the Bill of Rights by which slavery was abol val Lowell, of Bristol, England, who settled in Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1639. In the ancient records of the colony the name is written Lowle. The family has been distinguished in every generation. Francis Cabot Lowell, for whom the city of Lowell was named, was among the first to perceive that the wealth of New England was to come from manufac-ished in Massachusetts. Dr. Charles Lowell married Harriet Spence, a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, belonging to a Scotch family, descended, according to tradition, from the Sir Patrick Spens of the well-known ballad. The mother of Harriet Spence was named Traill, a native of one of the Orkneys. Mrs. Harriet Spence Lowell had a great memory, an extraordinary aptitude for languages, and a passionate fondness for ancient songs and ballads. She had five children: Charles, Robert (the Rev. Robert Traill Spence Lowell, an author and poet), Mary Lowell Putnam (a Elmwood, though not very ancient, has an interesting history. The house was built by Peter Oliver, who was stamp-distributer just before the outbreak of the Revolution. It will be remembered that, being waited upon by a Boston committee of about four thousand," and requested to resign his obnoxious office, Oliver hurriedly complied, and shortly after left the country. The house was next occupied by Elbridge Gerry, an eminent man in his day, from whose crooked plan of districting, the political term "gerrymandering" was derived. After his death it became lady of singular ability and learning), Rebecca, and James Russell, the subject of this sketch, who was the youngest, born February 22, 1819. The children were nurtured with romances and minstrelsy. The old songs were sung over their cradles, and repeated in early school-days, until poetic lore and taste-foreign grafts in many minds-were as natural to them as the bodily senses. It seldom happens in this country that a lifetime is passed without change of residence; but, except during his visits abroad, Lowell has always lived in the house in which he was born. the property of Dr. Lowell, about a year before the birth of the poet. It is of wood, three stories high, and stands on the baseline of a triangle of which the apex reaches nearly to the gate of Mount Auburn Cemetery. The ample grounds have an abundant growth of trees, most of them planted by the prudent doctor as a screen from the winds. There are a few native elms, but those which give the name to the estate are English, sturdy as oaks, standing in front of the house. In front, also, are large and beautiful ash-trees. In the deep space at the rear there is perfect seclusion: it seems like the still ness of the woods. During the lifetime of his father the poet occupied as a study the west front room in the upper story. The distant view from the study windows is broad and panoramic, comprising portions of Brighton, Brookline, and Roxbury, and ending on the left with the dome of the State-House in Boston. The nearer view, over the neighboring lawns, includes the Charles and the marshes. The sluggish river winds through tracts of salt-meadow, now approaching camps of meditative willows, now creeping under "caterpillar bridges," and now turning away from terraced villas and turfy promontories. In summer the long coils of silver are set in a ground of green that is vivid and tremulous, like watered silk; in autumn the grasses are richly mottled purple, sage, and brown; and the play of sunlight and shadow, while the winds are brushing the velvet this way and that, gives an inimitable life to the picture. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, IN HIS THIRTY-SIXTH YEAR. around the inclosure a gigantic hedge stands like a jagged silhouette against the sky. This lofty hedge is made up of a great variety of trees: it bristles with points of tufted pines; it is set at midheight with thrifty and elbowing willows and dense horse-chestnuts; and beneath, it is filled in with masses of shrubs. In the area are broad grassy levels, with a few pear and apple trees, and nearer the house are younger pines, elms, firs, clumps of lilacs, syringas, fleur-de-lis, gorgeous rugs of striped grass, and other ornamental growths disdained by modern gardeners, but immortal in the calendars of poets. This study contained about a thousand volumes of books, a few classic engravings, water-color paintings by Stillman, Roman photographs, a table with papers and letters in confusion, and a choice collection of pipes. Over the mantel was a panel, venerable and smoky, that had been brought from the house of one of the ancient Lowells in Newbury, on which was painted a group of clergymen, in their robes, wigs, and bands, seated about a table, each enjoying a long clay pipe. On an arch above an alcove was this legend in Latin: "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity." This picture, though scarcely a work of art, is interest customs of the clergy of the last century. This room was for many years the delightful resort of a few friends, especially on Sunday afternoons. Elmwood is full of birds-robins and their homelier cousins, the brown thrush-ing for the light it throws upon the social es, swallows, bluebirds, flaming orioles, yellow-birds, wrens, and sparrows. The leafy coverts are inviolate, and some of the tenants, even the migratory robins, keep house the year round. All are perfectly at home, and they appear to sing all day. On summer evenings, after the chatter of the sparrows has ceased, and the robins have sung for curfew, you may hear the pée-ad of night-hawks, and the screams of herons and other aquatic birds, as they fly over from the neighboring waters. After the death of Dr. Lowell the libraries were brought together in two connected rooms on the lower floor. The new study was more spacious and convenient, but the precious associations and the beautiful outlook belonged to the upper chamber. The house throughout was a study of the picturesque. In the hall were ances- The nearest neighbor to Elmwood in 1825 was William Wells, who kept a boys' school, and from him the poet got most of his early education; he was for a time, however, pupil of a Mr. Ingraham, who had a classical school in Boston. Mr. Wells was a thoroughly educated Englishman, who had been a member of a publishing house in Boston-Wells and Lily. Lowell entered Harvard College in his sixteenth year, and was graduated in 1838. Among his classmates and friends wereCharles Devens, a general in our late war, afterward a Judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, and now the Attorney-General of the United States; Rev. Rufus Ellis; the late Professor Nathan Hale; Hon. George B. Loring, M. C.; William W. Story, the sculptor and poet; Rev. J. I. T. Coolidge: Professor W. P. Atkinson; and others less known to fame. The Rev. E. E. Hale was in the class following. mains absolutely a poet in feeling. His native genius was fostered by the associations of a singularly beautiful home; it was nourished by the works of the dramatists-masters of emotion and expressionby the ideal pictures of poets and novelists, and by the tender solemnity of the discourses of his father, and of Channing and others of his father's friends. Nature and the early surroundings had been BEAVER BROOK.-[SEE PAGE 262.] alike favorable; and though he was not a rhyming prodigy like Pope, lisping in numbers, his first effusions, as he came to manhood, were in poetic form. His rank in scholarship was not a matter of pride. He has been used to say that he read almost everything-except the text-books prescribed by the faculty. Το certain branches of study, especially to mathematics, he had an invincible repugnance; and his degree was perhaps a tribute to his known ability, bestowed as an incentive to future diligence, and partly in deference to his honored father. His After leaving college, Lowell entered vast and multifarious reading was the ef- the law school, and having finished the ficient fertilization of his mind. Learn- prescribed course, took his degree of ing, in its higher sense, came later. His LL.B. in 1840. He opened an office in was the nurture of Cervantes, Boccaccio, Boston, but it does not appear that he Spenser, and Shakspeare. Though emi-ever seriously engaged in the practice of nent and able in many ways, Lowell re-law. The Rev. Mr. Hale says that his |