James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol. 1/2 — Themes and Context

e, Rebecca ten, Mary a little over eight, William between five and six, and Robert[7] between two and three. All these lived to maturity, excepting William, who died when James was four years old. Charles by his seniority was the mentor and guide of his younger brother during his adolescence, especially when their father was absent, as he was once for a journey in Europe, but Mary[8] was the sister to whom he was especially committed in his childhood. She was his little nurse, and as her own love of poetry came early, she was wont to read him to sleep, when he took his daily nap, from Spenser,[9] and she used to relate in after years how hard the little boy found it to go to sleep under the charm of the stories, yet how firmly nature closed his eyes at last.

His own recorded recollections of childhood are not many, yet as far back as he could remember he was visited by visions night and day. An oft-recurring dream was of having the earth put into his hand like an orange. Dr. Weir Mitchell notes that Lowell told him he had since boyhood been subject to visions, which appeared usually in the evening. Commonly he saw a figure in mediæval costume which kept on one side of him,--perhaps an outcome of his early familiarity with Spenser and Shakespeare. Most of all in his memories of childhood he recalled vividly the contact with nature in the enchanted realm of Elmwood, and the free country into which it passed easily. With the eye of a hawk he spied all the movements in that wide domain, and brooded over the lightest stir with an unconscious delight which was the presage of the poet in him. “The balancing of a yellow butterfly over a thistle broom was spiritual food and lodging for a whole forenoon.”

Indeed, there could scarcely have been a better nesting-place for one who was all his life long to love the animation of nature and to portray in verse and prose its homely and friendly aspects rather than its large, solemn, or expansive scenes. In after life, especially when away from home, he recurred to his childish experiences in a tone which had the plaint of homesickness. From the upper windows of the house--that tower of enchantment for many a child--he could see a long curve of the Charles, the wide marshes beyond the river, and the fields which lay between Elmwood and the village of Cambridge. Within the place itself were the rosebushes and asters, the heavy headed goat’s-beard, the lilac bushes and syringas which bordered the path from the door to what his father, in New England phrase, called the avenue, and which later became formally Elmwood Avenue; but chiefest were the shag-bark trees, the pines, the horse-chestnuts, and the elms, a young growth in part in his childhood, for his father took delight in giving this permanence to the home; and the boy himself caught the fancy, for when he was fifty-six years old he rejoiced in the huge stack of shade cast for him by a horse-chestnut, whose seed he had planted more than fifty years before. And in trees and bushes sang the birds that were to be his companions through life. Over the buttercups whistled the orioles; and bobolinks, catbirds, linnets, and robins were to teach him notes,--

“The Aladdin’s trap-door of the past to lift.”

In those days bank swallows frequented the cliff of the gravel pit by the river, and Lowell remembered how his father would lead him out to see the barn swallows, which had been flying in and out of the mows, gather on the roof before their yearly migration. “I learned,” he wrote long after,--

“I learned all weather-signs of day or night; No bird but I could name him by his flight, No distant tree but by his shape was known, Or, near at hand, by leaf or bark alone. This learning won by loving looks I hived As sweeter lore than all from books derived.”[10]