To hold his way against the public frown,

The ban of Church and State, the fierce mob's hounding down.

For while he wrought with strenuous will

The work his hands had found to do,

He heard the fitful music still

Of winds that out of dream-land blew.
The din about him could not drown

What the strange voices whispered down;
Along his task-field weird processions swept,
The visionary pomp of stately phantoms stepped.

The common air was thick with dreams, -
He told them to the toiling crowd;
Such music as the woods and streams
Sang in his ear he sang aloud;

In still, shut bays, on windy capes,

He heard the call of beckoning shapes,

And, as the gray old shadows prompted him,

To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim.

Whittier never married. Circumstances,' he wrote, the care of an aged mother, and the duty owed to a sister in delicate health for many years, must be my excuse for living the lonely life which has called out thy pity. . . . I have learned to look into happiness through the eyes of others.' Still more cogent reasons for not marrying were his comparative poverty, his ill health, and especially the strong feeling of the Quakers that it was not permissible to marry out of their own sect. There are beautiful memories of his school-boy loves in poems like 'My Playmate,' 'Benedicite,' A Sea Dream,'' Memories,' and In School-Days,' and these poems of dim and delicate reminiscence, untouched by the realities of life, sometimes seem more beautiful than any songs of living passion. His home, for many years, was made by his younger sister, Elizabeth, until her death, in 1864 ; then by his niece, Elizabeth Whittier, till her marriage, in 1876. After this he lived most of the time with three sisters, his cousins, at Oak Knoll, Danvers. His faculties remained unimpaired to the last, and he died at the age of eighty-four, September 7, 1892.

Whittier was primarily the poet of abolition; but enough has already been said on that part of his work. Next, he was the poet of Nature in New England. His poems of the Merrimac Valley, of Lake Winnipesaukee and the mountains near it, of Hampton Beach and the Marblehead coast, are unsurpassed in simple truth and love. But most of all he is the poet of country life in New England. This means more than at first appears, for it was from these New England homes that the larger number and the more energetic of the young men, like the older brothers of Whittier's father and grandfather, went out to take and make the great Northwest and then the greater West; moreover Whittier, in speaking for his own section, often expresses what the whole of America is and means as contrasted with the Old World, - in The Last Walk in Autumn,' for instance. There are two or three other points to be noted in summary. One is the simple beauty, truth, and modesty of Whittier's own nature, constantly and unconsciously showing itself in his many personal poems, and in his modest estimate of his own work, as in the Proem.' Another is that he ranks as our truest, though not our greatest, narrative poet. This has already been touched on in speaking of Longfellow; as a writer of ballads, Whittier surpasses Longfellow in everything except that which is after all the first essential, but only one essential, — spirited movement. And finally, he is our chief religious poet.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

HOLMES was a great believer in ancestry, and very proud of his own. Through his mother he was connected with the Phillipses, and was a cousin of Wendell Phillips; with the Bradstreets, and was a direct descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the first American poetess; with the Quincys, and was the great-grandson of Dorothy Q.;' with the Hancocks, one of whom had married the second Dorothy Quincy, niece of the first; and with the Wen

dells, one of the old Dutch families who came to America about 1646. He was named for his maternal grandfather, the Honorable Oliver Wendell. On the other side of the family his great-great-grandfather, John Holmes, of Puritan stock, settled in Woodstock, Conn., in 1686. His grandfather, David Holmes, the Deacon' who built the One-Hoss Shay,' was a captain in the French and Indian wars, and surgeon in the Revolutionary army. His father, Rev. Abiel Holmes, graduated at Yale in 1782, preached in Georgia for six years, and then came to settle in Cambridge, Mass., where for forty years he was pastor of the First Church. He was also an author and lecturer, and wrote the Annals of America, the first important history after the Revolution. He lived in the house with the gambrelroof,' which stood near the site of the present Harvard Gymnasium, and which is so often alluded to in Holmes's writings and so lovingly described in the Poet at the Breakjast Table. Here Holmes was born, almost under the shadow of the elms in the Harvard College yard, August 29, 1809. He went to school first in Cambridge, then at Phillips Academy, Andover. While at the Academy, he made a translation in heroic couplets of the first book of Virgil's Æneid. He entered Harvard with the 'famous class of '29' (see notes on 'The Boys,' pages 374, 375). Beside his own classmates who later became illus trious, he knew in college Charles Sumner, of the class of 1830, and Wendell Phillips and John Lothrop Motley, of 1831.

After graduation he spent a year in the Law School, and published during this year more than a score of poems, many of them in a college periodical, the Collegian. Most of these were humorous skits, but there ring out among them the thrilling lines of ́Old Ironsides.' Thus from the beginning, as throughout his life, love of fun and love of country were two chief elements in Holmes's poetry. At the end of the year he abandoned the law and took up the study of medicine. From 1833 to 1835 he spent a little more than two years in study abroad, mostly at Paris, and came back to take his degree at the Harvard Medical School in 1836. At the same Commencement he read his Phi Beta Kappa poem: Poetry; A Metrical Essay.' This was published later in the year, with other poems, among them the 'Last Leaf,' which had already appeared in a miscellaneous collection, the Harbinger, in 1833. We may say that he commenced' doctor and poet at the same time; and his profession and his poetry were to be the two chief interests of his life, neither ever crowding out the other.

During the following years he published or edited a number of important medical books, was professor of anatomy at Dartmouth College for a short time, settled in Boston in 1840 to the practice of his profession, and was married in that year to Miss Amelia Lee Jackson. In 1846 he published his second volume of collected Poems, and in 1847 was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, a position which he held as an active teacher until 1882, and as professor emeritus until his death, in 1894, in all fortyseven years.

Like the other New England poets, Holmes came rather late to his maturity as a writer. It was not until he began the Breakfast Table series, on which, even more than on his verse, will depend his ultimate fame, that he began also to write his best poetry. The Chambered Nautilus,' the One-Hoss Shay,' Latter-Day Warnings,' 'Contentment,' 'Parson Turell's Legacy,' The Living Temple,' 'The Voiceless,' all appeared first with the Autocrat papers (1857-58). Among these are two of his best humorous narratives, and two of his best serious lyrics. In the Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859) appeared The Boys,' Under the Violets,' and Holmes's two best hymns. The Civil War period called out some of his strongest verse, notably Union and Liberty,' 'The Voyage of the Good Ship Union,' and the poem on Bryant's seventieth birthday. Meanwhile he had begun that series of poems for his class reunions, in which there is not a break for thirty-nine years, and which thus forms one of the largest and most characteristic sections of his work. Occasional poetry is usually doomed to sure and quick oblivion. Holmes had the rare faculty of giving it a touch of greater vitality, while at the same time fitting it closely to the occasion. Class loyalty, and college loyalty, and the lasting reality of men's friendships, are not merely local and occasional things. Holmes has expressed these in his class poems, and in others like 'At a Meeting of Friends,' and 'At the Saturday Club,' and in his trib

utes to his fellow poets. In these and others of his occasional poems (the 'Voyage of the Good Ship Union' is one of the class poems) he has expressed also the broader loyalty of patriotism, both local and national. And in his later class poems the charm of mellow, genial, and youthful old age has found unique expression.

There is little further to be said of the external facts of Holmes's life, or of his work. This is not the place to speak of his Lovels and other prose work, or of how he gave to the Atlantic Monthly its name and its character. Lowell was willing to accept the editorship only on condition that Holmes should be a constant contributor, and later he said: "You see the Doctor is like a bright mountain stream that has been dammed up among the hills, and is waiting for an outlet into the Atlantic.' His later volumes of verse were published, Songs in Many Keys in 1861, Humorous Poems in 1865, Songs of Many Seasons in 1874, Bunker Hill Battle, etc. in 1875, The Iron Gate, etc. in 1880, Before the Curfew in 1888. He died October 7, 1894, the oldest, and the last survivor,' of our elder poets.

If Whittier is the poet of a single section, New England, Holmes is the poet of a single city, Boston. It is a pity that he, instead of Emerson, did not write the quatrain

What care though rival cities soar

Along the stormy coast,

Penn's town, New York, and Baltimore,

If Boston knew the most?

Holmes would have written it better, and with some peculiar quaint touch of his own humor. He makes one of his characters in the Autocrat say: 'Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System. You could n't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.' He says it in satire, but he has a subtle feeling that it is true. On the whole his verse, however, is to a less degree merely local in flavor than his prose.

Holmes seldom strikes the deeper notes or touches on the higher themes of poetry, except that of patriotism. He is one of the chief poets of friendship and loyalty, as we have seen, but he expresses friendship rather in its social aspect, and chooses only to suggest its deeper feelings. So always, it is his own choice to touch but lightly on the surface of things. But if he is not among the great poets, he is among the rare. It is even one of the rarest things to make real poetry out of mere wit and humor, as he has so often done. In his humorous narratives, from the One-Hoss Shay' to the 'Broomstick Train,' and perhaps most of all in 'How the Old Horse won the Bet,' his verse sparkles and crackles in every line. And he has written two lyrics that are sure to live, the one serious, and the other so interwoven of fun and pathos that we shall never know whether it be serious or not: the Chambered Nautilus,' and the Last Leaf.'

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL was born February 22, 1819, in Cambridge, at 'Elmwood,' the house which he occupied during so large a part of his life. The Lowells were an old New England family, going back, in Massachusetts Colony, to 1639. The poet's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were graduates of Harvard College. It was John Lowell, his grandfather, who as a member of the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts in 1780 introduced into the Bill of Rights of the State a clause abolishing slavery — a good sort of grandfather for the author of the Biglow Papers,' as Dr. Edward Everett Hale The great-grandfather was a clergyman, the grandfather a lawyer, and the father again a clergyman, pastor of the First Church in Boston. The family had always been distinguished for ability and public spirit. An uncle of the poet, Francis Cabot Lowell, was one of the first successful manufacturers of New England, and for him the city of Lowell was named. Another uncle, John Lowell, Jr., founded the Lowell Institute in Boston.

says.

Lowell's mother was of Orkney descent. Both her father, Keith Spence, and her mother's father, Robert Traill, were New England merchants who had come from the

Orkney Islands. Her mother's mother, Mary Whipple, was, however, of New England ancestry. Mary Whipple's father, William Whipple, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and her mother belonged to another old New England family, the Cutts, going back to the first half of the seventeenth century in New England.

James Russell Lowell was the youngest of six brothers and sisters. His home training, as in the case of Holmes, was that of a scholarly minister's family, illuminated in his case by his mother's strong imaginative temperament and skill in music. As a child, he was read to sleep from Spenser's Faerie Queene. He was surrounded by books and by nature (Elmwood being then at a considerable distance from other houses, among the woods and meadows), and from the first he showed an almost passionate love of both.

After fitting for college in a Cambridge school, he entered Harvard in 1834, and had among his teachers there C. C. Felton, professor of Greek and later president of the college (celebrated by Longfellow in 'Three Friends of Mine'), Benjamin Peirce, the mathematician of Holmes's famous Class of '29,' George Ticknor, Longfellow's predecessor in the Smith professorship of Belles Lettres, and, in the last half of his course, Longfellow himself. Lowell read in college, he tells us, almost everything except the text-books prescribed by the faculty.' He had already devoured Scott's novels before entering college. Now he read Dante, Tasso, Montaigne, the old English dramatists, Butler, Cowper, Burns, Landor, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Carlyle, and Milton, and, under the impulse of his study of Milton, something of the classics. As Dr. Hale tells us in his reminiscences, the college boys of those days were passionately devoted to literature, and Lowell's knowledge and ability made him a leader among them. He was an editor of Harvardiana, and was elected class poet. During his senior year he became so much more devoted to reading than to studying, and so regardless of prescribed exercises, including chapel, that he was suspended on account of continued neglect of his college duties, as it was expressed in the vote of the faculty; and was rusticated at Concord, where he lived and studied in the household of the Rev. Barzillai Frost. During this rustication he perhaps found models both for the Rev. Homer Wilbur and for Hosea Biglow.

In any case, he met Emerson, and walked and talked with him, but at first was influenced more toward opposition than toward discipleship. In his class poem, which he was not allowed to deliver, but which he printed for distribution among his classmates, be ridiculed the transcendentalists and the abolitionists, and, in a mild way, Emerson himself. He loyally sent a copy of the poem to Emerson, with a note excusing himself for these liberties, but stoutly maintaining his own opinions. Emerson's influence gradually ' struck in,' however, and Lowell became, though not a disciple, an ardent admirer. Late in life he signed himself Emerson's liegeman,' and said that he for one must Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.' We also find the anti-slavery feeling growing in him during this same year, and beginning to dominate his thought at least a year before he first met Miss Maria White, to whose influence it has usually been attributed. The abolitionists,' he wrote in November, 1838, are the only ones with whom I sympathize of the present extant parties.'

He had been allowed to return to Cambridge just in time to graduate with his class in 1838. Not knowing what else to do, he, like Holmes, began the study of the law, and graduated from the Law School in 1840. During these two years he continued his eager reading, and now paid much more attention to the classics than he had done in college when they were prescribed subjects. Ovid, Theocritus, and the Greek dramatists seem to have been his favorites. In August, 1840, he graduated from the Law School, and became engaged to Miss Maria White, whom he had met late in the previous year. He entered a law office in Boston, but spent most of his time in reading and in writing verse, and seems never to have had, on his own account, that 'First Client' whose imaginary existence offered the material of his later humorous sketch. Late in this year (1840) he published his first book of verse, A Year's Life, dated 1841; and in 1841-1842 he published many

poems and essays in the magazines of the time. Among his poems of this period are the beautiful lyrics,'My Love,'' Irene,' and the song 'O Moonlight deep and tender;' and in many of the sonnets there is a personal sincerity and a fineness of poetic quality to be found in few other American sonnets. These poems express his feeling for Miss White, whose influence upon him was strong and always ideal. It was partly through her influence, and partly through his own natural development, that Lowell had now openly joined forces with the extreme abolitionists, at a time when abolition seemed mere quixotism, was despised by almost all conservative people, even in New England, and shut out its devotees from the social circles to which Lowell was born, and from many of the most important literary magazines and publishing houses.

At the end of 1842 Lowell entirely gave up the law, and with Robert Carter attempted to start a new magazine, The Pioneer. This was not a success financially, and left Lowell considerably in debt by its failure after the third number had been published. The list of contributors to the three numbers which did appear included most of the chief contemporary writers, - Hawthorne, Whittier, Poe, W. W. Story, Thomas William Parsons, and Lowell. Lowell was in New York during the winter of 1842-43, and made many acquaintances and friends among the men of letters there. He published a new volume of Poems in December, 1843 (dated 1844), which contained Rhocus,' • An Incident in a Railroad Car,' 'The Shepherd of King Admetus,' the 'Stanzas on Freedom,' etc. A year later, in December, 1844, he published Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. Both these volumes were republished in London, and they brought Lowell considerable reputation in England and in America.

Lowell was married to Miss White in December, 1844, and for some months after his marriage lived in Philadelphia, where he was employed as editorial writer on the Pennsylvania Freeman at the munificent salary of ten dollars a month. In May, 1845, he returned to Elmwood, where he lived until his first trip to Europe, in 1851. These were the busiest and poetically the most productive years of his life, and they were years full of both joy and sorrow in his home life, and of growing friendships with his chief contemporaries, most of them, like Holmes and Longfellow, his elders by ten years or more. His first child, Blanche, was born December 31, 1845, and died March 19, 1847. The second daughter, Mabel, was born September 9, 1847. Lowell is not so popular a poet of the home as Longfellow, but in The First Snowfall,' The Changeling,' She Came and Went,' I thought our love at full, but I did err,' and later, in After the Burial,' The Dead House,' 'The Wind-Harp,' and 'Auf Wiedersehen,' he has written poems of home joys and sorrows that have a deeper and more intimate appeal.

The year 1848 has been called by Lowell's latest biographer his annus mirabilis.' Just at the end of 1847 appeared his Poems, Second Series (dated 1848), containing the noble poem Columbus; the characteristic Indian Summer Reverie;' The Present Crisis, as strong and as universal in its truth as the very best of Whittier's work; To the Dandelion;' and other important short poems. In 1848 were published the Biglow Papers, First Series, the Fable for Critics, and the Vision of Sir Launfal, besides some forty articles and poems in various periodicals. From 1846 to 1850 Lowell was a regular contributor to the National Anti-Slavery Standard. In July, 1851, he sailed for Europe, spent nearly a year in Italy, and returned home through Switzerland, Germany, France, and England, having for companions on the return voyage Thackeray and Clough. The journey had been undertaken partly on account of Mrs. Lowell's health, but she continued to fail, and died October 21, 1853.

Holmes had given his lectures on the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century at the Lowell Institute in 1853. In the winter of 1854-55 Lowell gave there a general course on poetry, which marked the beginning of his mature criticism, and which seems to have impressed its hearers as the best lecture-course ever given at this famous Institute. Three weeks after the beginning of the course he was appointed to the Smith Professorship at Harvard (which Longfellow had just resigned), with a year's leave of absence for study and travel abroad. He held this professorship, except for an interval of two years, until his appointment as Minister to Spain in 1877. Since Lowell's resignation of it no