Unfortunately, Mr. Lowell is not at home. He is in his own country and among his own people; but he is not at Elmwood. For nearly a decade now his friends have ceased to pass under the portal of those great English trees and find him by the chimney-fire, “toasting his toes,” or engaged in less meditative tasks amid the light and shadow of his books. Loss to them has been gain to us; for in the more open life of a man of the world and of affairs, at Madrid and London, the public has seemed to see him more intimately, and has been pleased to feel some share in his honor as a representative American gentleman of what must be called an ageing, if not the old, school. But for lovers of the author, as for his neighbors and acquaintances and his contemporaries in literature, Lowell is indissolubly set in Elmwood, and is not to be thought of elsewhere except as in absence. There, sixty-seven years ago, when Elmwood was but a part of the country landscape of old Cambridge, he was born of an honorable family of the colonial time, and learned his alphabet and accidence, and imbibed from the cultivated and solid company that gathered about his father the simplicity of manners and severe idealism of mind of which he continues the tradition; there, in college days, he “read everything except his text-books,” and with his _æquales_ of the class of 1838 won a somewhat reluctant sonship from a displeased _Alma Mater_; being in his youth, as he once remarked to the rebellious founders of _The Harvard Advocate_, “something of a revolutionist myself”; and it was from there he went out as far as Boston, to begin that legal career which was not to end in the glory of a justice’s wig. And after the early volume of poems was published and a kindly fire had exhausted the edition, and when _The Pioneer_--what a name that was to gather into its frontiersman-stroke Hawthorne, Story, Poe, Very and the brawny Mrs. Browning!--had gone down in the first financial morass, still the pleasant upper room at Elmwood, looking off over the sweep of the Charles and the lines of the horizon-hills, was as far from being the scene of forensic discussion as it was from taking its conversational tone from the ancient clergymen who, with their long pipes, looked down on the poet’s friends from an old panel over the fireplace. The Bar has lost many a deserter to the Muses, and it was a settled thing with the birds of Elmwood--and the place is still a woodland city of them--that although they “half-forgave his being human,” they would not forgive his being a lawyer. So, Lowell kept to his walks in the country and confided the knowledge of his haunts to the readers of his verses, and from the beginning rhymed the nobler human tone with the notes of nature; and he married, and many reminiscences remain, among the men of that day of that brief happiness, one bright episode of which was his Italian journey. The first series of “The Biglow Papers” appeared, and