Page images
PDF
EPUB

the feast of love and kindness which this gentle and generous and charitable soul has contributed to the happiness of the world. I take and enjoy my share, and say a benediction for the meal.

[ocr errors][merged small]

In tattered old slippers that toast at the bars,
And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars,
Away from the world and its toils and its cares,
I've a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs.

To mount to this realm is a toil, to be sure,
But the fire there is bright, and the air rather pure;
And the view I behold on a sunshiny day

Is grand through the chimney-pots over the way.

This snug little chamber is crammed in all nooks, With worthless old knick-knacks and silly old books, And foolish old odds and foolish old ends,

Cracked bargains from brokers, cheap keepsakes from friends.

[ocr errors]

Old armor, prints, pictures, pipes, china (all cracked),
Old rickety tables, and chairs broken-backed,
A twopenny treasury, wondrous to see:
What matter? 'tis pleasant to you, friend, and me.

No better divan need the Sultan require

Than the creaking old sofa that basks by the fire;
And 'tis wonderful, surely, what music you get
From the rickety, ramshackle, wheezy spinet.

That praying-rug came from a Turcoman's camp;
By Tiber once twinkled that brazen old lamp;
A Mameluke fierce yonder dagger has drawn
'Tis a murderous knife to toast muffins upon.

Long, long through the hours, and the night and the chimes,

Here we talk of old books, and old friends, and old

times;

As we sit in a fog made of rich Latakie,

This chamber is pleasant to you, friend, and me.

But of all the cheap treasures that garnish my nest,
There's one that I love and I cherish the best;
For the finest of couches that's padded with hair
I never would change thee, my cane-bottomed chair.

'Tis a bandy-legged, high-shouldered, worm-eaten seat,
With a creaking old back, and twisted old feet;
But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there,
I bless thee and love thee, old cane-bottomed chair.

If chairs have but feeling in holding such charms,
A thrill must have passed through your withered old
arms?

I looked, and I longed, and I wished in despair;
I wished myself turned to a cane-bottomed chair.

It was but a moment she sat in this place;

She'd a scarf on her neck, and a smile on her face, A smile on her face, and a rose in her hair;

And she sat there and bloomed in my cane-bottomed chair.

And so I have valued my chair ever since,
Like the shrine of a saint, or the throne of a prince;
Saint Fanny, my patroness sweet I declare,

The queen of my heart and my cane-bottomed chair.

When the candles burn low, and the company's gone,
In the silence of night as I sit here alone,
I sit here alone, but we yet are a pair;
My Fanny I see in my cane-bottomed chair.

She comes from the past, and revisits my room;
She looks as she then did, all beauty and bloom;
So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair,
And yonder she sits in my cane-bottomed chair.

XX. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

LIFE AND WORKS.

AMONG the literary men of this generation, James Russell Lowell presents perhaps the most rounded example of American training and culture. He is at the same time distinguished as a scholar, and as a man of public affairs. While he has profited by the literatures of all nations, he has been the disciple of no one literary master, but has brought an art of his own to the creation of works that strikingly bear the impress of the national spirit and genius.

The subject of this sketch is descended from a line of Puritan ancestors running back to the early days of Massachusetts history. In every generation the Lowell family has produced men of solid, high-minded character; and the father of our poet was Dr. Charles Lowell, a distinguished divine. His mother, Harriet Spencer, belonged to a Scotch family settled in New Hampshire, and it is from her that James Russell inherits his poetic gift. We are told that her memory was a storehouse of minstrelsy and romance, which "she sung over the cradles of her children, and repeated in their early school-days, until poetic lore and feeling were as natural to them as the bodily senses."

James Russell Lowell was born Feb. 22, 1819, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a spacious three-story wooden house known as Elmwood. It is surrounded by ample grounds, one boundary of which touches on the beautiful Mount Auburn Cemetery, while a stone

thrown from a sling would reach the home of Longfellow. A noble grove in which are many fine English elms gives the name to the residence. It may be noted as an interesting fact, and an uncommon one in this country, that except during his visits abroad the poet has always lived in the house in which he was born.

After the ordinary years of schooling the lad entered Harvard College in his sixteenth year, and was graduated in 1838. It is said that he did not take high rank in scholarship; and he has himself confessed that he read almost every thing-except the prescribed textbooks. However, his multifarious reading of travels, plays, and poems stored his mind, and fed his imagination; and "learning, in its higher sense, came later.” After leaving college, Lowell went through the Law School, and in 1840 opened an office in Boston; but it does not appear that he ever seriously engaged in the practice of law.

Our poet's first literary venture was a small volume of poems entitled "A Year's Life," published a little before his twenty-second birthday. Though most of the pieces have been set aside by Lowell's severer judgment, some of them show intimations of the genius that was to shine out clearly in after-days. About three years later appeared another volume of poems that showed a much higher order of power. It contained such poems as "The Legends of Brittany," "The Heritage," "A Parable," and other pieces which indicated that Lowell's mind was laboring with large and fundamental problems. It was at this time also that he began to take a warm interest in the various reform

« PreviousContinue »