_James Russell Lowell._--By general consent, Longfellow is our American poet, _par excellence_, Emerson our philosopher, James Russell Lowell our man of letters. Others, Lowell among them, have shared more richly than Longfellow in a distinctively lyrical temperament; others have thought more consecutively than Emerson. No one, however, when his initial talents are considered, has produced so much good poetry as Longfellow; no one in the realm of philosophic thought has been so patently influential as Emerson; and no one, not even Irving, has fared well in so many avenues of literature and popular scholarship as Lowell. He was poet, critic, professor, editor, diplomat, patriot, humanist; and withal he was a man and a friend. He was born on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1819, at “Elmwood,” Cambridge, a house still in the possession of his family. On his father’s side he was of English blood, being descended from Percival Lowell, who came from Somersetshire to Massachusetts Colony in 1639; through his mother he drew his lineage from the folk of the Orkney Islands. His father was a well educated clergyman, faithful and affectionate; his mother, whether really gifted with second sight or not, was of a less usual type, imaginative, high-strung, with a tendency to mental derangement. During his infancy her youngest son heard ballads for lullabies. As a child he was read to sleep with Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.” When he grew older, he had the range of his father’s generously stocked library. At the age of nine, he was devouring Walter Scott, and, like Scott at the same age, was astonishing his companions with improvised tales of fear and wonder. His imagination was not unduly stimulated; he lived a wholesome outdoor life, and he had a sound schooling in the classics. When he went to Harvard, in 1834, “he was a shy yet not very tractable youth, given, like so many boys who are shy from excess rather than from defect of ability, to occasional violence and oddity of expression or act.” At Harvard, he gradually rebelled against the rigour of a fixed curriculum, but read omnivorously in English literature of the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, and, following the English romanticists of a generation previous, paid particular attention to Spenser and Milton. “Milton,” he observes, “has excited my ambition to read all the Greek and Latin classics which he did.” Lowell had gone through a precocious love affair at the age of ten; while in college he was again “hopelessly in love.” His efforts in the way of serious writing were at this time facile and, naturally, not profound; his humour was naïve, and more engaging. His gradual neglect of the prescribed routine, in spite of his father’s attempts to stir up in the young man a respect for academic honours, at length brought upon Lowell the open displeasure of the Harvard faculty; so that in his senior year he was temporarily suspended, and directed to regain his