James Russell Lowell and His Friends. Edward Everett Hale
father. Indeed, I must speak of the blood which was in the veins of father and son, that readers at a distance from Boston may be reminded of a certain responsibility which attaches in Massachusetts to any one who bears the Lowell name.
I will go back only four generations, when the Rev. John Lowell was the Congregational minister of Newburyport, and so became a leader of opinion in Essex County. This man’s son, James Lowell’s grandfather, the second John Lowell, is the Lowell who as early as 1772 satisfied himself that, at the common law, slavery could not stand in Massachusetts. It is believed that he offered to a negro, while Massachusetts was still a province of the Crown, to try if the courts could not be made to liberate him as entitled to the rights of Englishmen. This motion of his may have been suggested by Lord Mansfield’s decision in 1772, in the Somerset case, which determined, from that day to this day, that—
“Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free!
They touch our country, and their shackles fall!”
But in that year John Lowell lost his chance. In 1779, however, he introduced the clause in our Massachusetts Bill of Rights under which the Supreme Court of Massachusetts freed every slave in the state who sought his freedom. Let me say in passing that some verses of his, written when he was quite a young man, are preserved in the “Pietas et Gratulatio.” This was an elegant volume which Harvard College prepared and sent to George III. in 1760 on his accession to the crown. They are written with the exaggeration of a young man’s verse; but they show, not only that he had the ear for rhythm and something of what I call the “lyric swing,” but also that he had the rare art of putting things. There is snap and epigram in the lines. Here they differ by the whole sky from the verses of James Russell, who was also a great-grandfather of our poet Lowell. This gentleman, a resident of Charlestown, printed a volume of poems, which is now very rare. I am, very probably, the only person in the world who has ever read it, and I can testify that there is not one line in the book which is worth remembering, if, indeed, any one could remember a line of it.
John Lowell, the emancipator, became a judge. He had three sons—John Lowell, who, without office, for many years led Massachusetts in her political trials; Francis Cabot Lowell, the founder of the city of Lowell; and Charles Lowell, the father of the poet. It is Francis Lowell’s son who founded the Lowell Institute, the great popular university of Boston. It is Judge John Lowell’s grandson who directs that institution with wonderful wisdom; and it is his son who gives us from day to day the last intelligence about the crops in Mars, or reverses the opinions of centuries as to the daily duties of Mercury and Venus. I say all this by way of illustration as to what we have a right to expect of a Lowell, and, if you please, of what James Russell Lowell demanded of himself as soon as he knew what blood ran in his veins.
In this connection one thing must be said with a certain emphasis; for the impression has been given that James Russell Lowell took up his anti-slavery sentiment from lessons which he learned from the outside after he left college.
The truth is that Wilberforce’s portrait hung opposite his father’s face in the dining-room. And it was not likely that in that house people had forgotten who wrote the anti-slavery clauses in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights only forty years before Lowell was born.
Before he was a year old the Missouri Compromise passed Congress. The only outburst of rage remembered in that household was when Charles Lowell, the father, lost his self-control, on the morning when he read his newspaper announcing that capitulation of the North to its Southern masters. It took more than forty years before that same household had to send its noblest offering to the war which should undo that capitulation. It was forty-five years before Lowell delivered the Harvard Commemoration Ode under the college elms.
REV. CHARLES LOWELL
From a painting in the possession of Charles Lowell, Boston
We are permitted to publish for the first time a beautiful portrait of the Rev. Charles Lowell when he was at his prime. The picture does more than I can do to give an impression of what manner of man he was, and to account for the regard, which amounts to reverence, with which people who knew him speak of him to this hour. The reader at a distance must try to imagine what we mean when we speak of a Congregational minister in New England at the end of the last century and at the beginning of this. We mean a man who had been chosen by a congregation of men to be their spiritual teacher for his life through, and, at the same time, the director of sundry important functions in the administration of public affairs. When one speaks of the choice of Charles Lowell to be a minister in Boston, it is meant that the selection was made by men who were his seniors, perhaps twice his age, among whom were statesmen, men of science, leaders at the bar, and merchants whose sails whitened all the ocean. Such men made the selection of their minister from the young men best educated, from the most distinguished families of the State.
In 1805 Charles Lowell returned from professional study in Edinburgh. He had been traveling that summer with Mr. John Lowell, his oldest brother. In London he had seen Wilberforce, who introduced him into the House of Commons, where he heard Fox and Sheridan. Soon after he arrived in Boston he was invited to preach at the West Church.
This church was the church of Mayhew, who was the Theodore Parker of his time. Mayhew was in the advance in the Revolutionary sentiment of his day, and Samuel Adams gave to him the credit of having first suggested the federation of the Colonies: “Adams, we have a communion of churches; why do we not make a communion of states?” This he said after leaving the communion table. In such a parish young Charles Lowell preached in 1805, from the text, “Rejoice in the Lord alway.” Soon after, he was unanimously invited to settle as its minister, and in that important charge he remained until he died, on the 20th of January, 1861.
Mr. Lowell was always one of those who interpreted most broadly and liberally the history and principles of the Christian religion. But he was never willing to join in the unfortunate schism which divided the Congregational churches between Orthodox and Unitarian. He and Dr. John Pierce, of Brookline, to their very death, succeeded in maintaining a certain nominal connection with the Evangelical part of the Congregational body.
The following note, written thirty-six years after James Lowell was born, describes his position in the disputes of “denominationalists”:—
My dear Sir: You must allow me to say that, whilst I am most happy to have my name announced as a contributor toward any fund that may aid in securing freedom and religious instruction to Kansas, I do not consent to its being announced as the minister of a Unitarian or Trinitarian church, in the common acceptation of those terms. If there is anything which I have uniformly, distinctly, and emphatically declared, it is that I have adopted no other religious creed than the Bible, and no other name than Christian as denoting my religious faith.
Very affectionately your friend and brother,
Cha. Lowell.
Elmwood, Cambridge,
December 19, 1855.
It may be said that he was more known as a minister than as a preacher. There was no branch of ministerial duty in which he did not practically engage. His relations with his people, from the beginning to the end, were those of entire confidence. But it must be understood, while this is said, that he was a highly popular preacher everywhere, and every congregation, as well as that of the West Church, was glad if by any accident of courtesy or of duty he appeared in the pulpit.
The interesting and amusing life by which the children of the family made a world of the gardens of Elmwood was in itself an education. The garden and grounds, as measured by a surveyor, were only a few acres. But for a circle of imaginative children, as well led as the Lowell children were, this is a little world. One is reminded of that fine passage in Miss Trimmers’s “Robins,” where, when the four little birds have made their first flight from the nest into the orchard, Pecksy says: “Mamma, what a large place the world is!” Practically, I think, for the earlier years of James Lowell’s life, Elmwood furnished as large a world as he wanted. Within its hedges and fences