Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an old church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here and there an old dwelling with the second story projecting (for the convenience of shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door with their tomahawks)――if they have, scattered about, those mighty square houses built something more than half a century ago, and standing like architectural boulders dropped by the former diluvium of wealth, whose refluent wave has left them as its monument,――if they have gardens with elbowed apple-trees that push their branches over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on the sidewalk,――if they have a little grass in their side-streets, enough to betoken quiet without proclaiming decay,――I think I could go to pieces, after my life’s tranquil places, as sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may be rocked to sleep in. I visit such spots always with infinite delight. My friend, the Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns are most unfavorable to the imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a man live in one of these old quiet places, he says, and the wine of his soul, which is kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy streets, settles, and as you hold it up, you may see the sun through it by day and the stars by night. Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great towns? I don’t believe there is much difference. You know how they read Pope’s line in the smallest town in our State of Massachusetts? Well, they read it,―― “All are but parts of one stupendous _Hull_!” Illustration: SOUVENIR OF HOLMES Illustration: (‡ decoration) JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. POET, CRITIC, AND ESSAYIST. WHILE the popularity of Lowell has not been so great as that of Whittier, Longfellow or Holmes, his poetry expresses a deeper thought and a truer culture than that of any one of these; or, indeed, of any other American poet, unless the exception be the “transcendental philosopher,” Emerson. As an anti-slavery poet, he was second only to Whittier. James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Mass., February 22, 1819, and died in the same city on August 12, 1891, in the seventy-third year of his age. He was the youngest son of the Rev. Charles Lowell, an eminent Congregational clergyman, and was descended from the English settlers of 1639. He entered Harvard in his seventeenth year and graduated in 1838, before he was twenty. He began to write verses early. In his junior year in college he wrote the anniversary poem, and, in his senior year, was editor of the college magazine. Subsequently, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1840; but, it seems, never entered upon the practice of his profession. If he did it is doubtful if he ever had even that _first client_ whom he afterwards described in a humorous sketch.