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James Russell Lowell, As an Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Toward Henry Thoreau

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“THE FIRST PERSON TO EXPRESS THE AMERICAN IDEA”1 His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him. — Margaret Fuller I’ve come up with a new theory to account for the hostility displayed by James Russell Lowell, as an editor of The Atlantic Monthly, toward Henry Thoreau. As you are presumably aware, these two knew each other early, both during their school years together at Harvard in Cambridge, and after Thoreau’s graduation in Concord where Lowell had been exiled (“rusticated”) from Cambridge for lack of attention to his studies, to be privately tutored by the Reverend Barzillai Frost. Lowell grew fond of making snippy derogations of Thoreau — after all, Lowell was one of the effete Boston nobs, of inheritance and family social standing, who moved in the hoity-toity circles of the downtown movers and shakers, whereas Thoreau was a mere village Frenchie nobody who, sniff, needed to get his hands all dirty. When in 1858 Thoreau offered an essay on the Maine woods to The Atlantic Monthly, Lowell arbitrarily deleted a sentence about a pine tree in Maine, “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still,” and Thoreau was powerless to correct him. Lowell simply refused to respond. Then Thoreau couldn’t get Lowell to pay him for the article, or even to communicate about the nonpayment. Thoreau would respond with fighting words, pointing out to Lowell that “his life is a kind of nightmare continued into broad daylight.” Ellery Sedgwick’s THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY 1857-1909: YANKEE HUMANISM AT HIGH TIDE AND EBB (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994, page 60) commented that “The incident shows Lowell at his worst — high- handed and subject to personal pique. The quarrel with Thoreau 1. The above phrase was self-description. HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL also shows that Lowell and Phillips were reluctant, as later editors and publishers would be, to engage too often in religious controversy.” In other words, Lowell supposedly had deleted the sentence because he had a religious objection to its “pantheism.” What I have uncovered, which it seems no-one has known about before, is a poem “To a Pine-Tree” by Lowell on pages 122-3 of the magazine put out by Brook Farm, The Harbinger: Devoted to Social and Political Progress, printed in 1845 thirteen years earlier, in which a roughly similar trope about a Maine pine tree had appeared: “Thou alone know’st the glory of summer, / Gazing down on thy broad seas of forest, / On thy subjects that send a proud murmur / Up to thee, to their sachem, who towerest / From thy bleak throne to heaven.” Could Lowell have been merely considering that Thoreau was “stealing his thunder”? —That Thoreau had been illicitly accessing and recycling Lowell’s 1845 poem about a pine tree in Maine? Is the “religious objection” theory of Sedgwick quite beside the point? “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1767 Elmwood, a three-story Georgian home, was constructed on Tory Row near the Charles River (Quinobequin) in Cambridge for the last Lieutenant-Governor of the Royal Province of Massachusetts. (It would be acquired by the family of origin of James Russell Lowell in 1818, and would eventually become the official residence of whoever happens to be the president of Harvard University.) HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1818 Elmwood, a three-story Georgian house on Tory Row near the Charles River (Quinobequin) in Cambridge that had been the home of the last Lieutenant-Governor of the Royal Province of Massachusetts in 1767 when it was new, was acquired by the family of origin of James Russell Lowell. NEW “HARVARD MEN” (It, would eventually become the official residence of whoever happens to be the president of Harvard University.) HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1819 February 22, Monday: The Adams/Onis Treaty was agreed to by Spain and the United States. Spain ceded East Florida and gave up all claim to West Florida. The southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase was defined. The US gave up its claim to Texas. James Russell Lowell was born at “Elmwood,” the Lowell family home on Tory Row near the Charles River (Quinobequin) in Cambridge that eventually would become the home of the president of Harvard University, the child of the Reverend Charles Lowell and Mrs. Harriet Traill Spence Lowell. The purchase of Spanish Florida. A Treaty of Amity, Settlement, and Limits with His Catholic Majesty was entered into by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Luis de Onis, the Spanish minister to Washington DC, according to which Spain would cede that peninsula to the USA and in addition renounce all its claims to the Oregon country west of the Rockies and north of the 42d parallel. A joint commission would be established to define a border between the dominions of the US and those of Spain from the 42d parallel southwest to the Sabine River, which would be accepted as the western border of the Louisiana territory. (This treaty would be ratified by the US Senate in 1821.) READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1830 By about this point the writings of the naturalist Reverend Gilbert White had become so popular in England, that what has been termed “the cult of Gilbert White” was beginning to reach even into America. The steady stream of visitors to Selborne, England would eventually include both Charles Darwin and John Burroughs, and the money that was being made off the sale of such books would eventually draw even the American editor and critic wannabee James Russell Lowell. The rise of the natural history essay in the latter half of the nineteenth century was an essential legacy of the Selborne cult. It was more than a scientific-literary genre of writing, modeled after White’s pioneering achievement. A constant theme of the nature essayists was the search for a lost pastoral haven, for a home in an inhospitable and threatening world.... [N]atural history was the vehicle that brought readers to the quiet peace of hay barns, orchards, and mountain valleys. These virtuosi of the nature essay were among the best selling writers of their age. In this regard, here is a quote from Professor Lawrence Buell’s analysis of the manner in which Henry Thoreau has entered the American canon: A generation after Henry Thoreau, John Burroughs, America’s leading nature essayist at the turn of the twentieth century, wrote about Thoreau in somewhat the same way eighteenth- century and romantic poets tended to write about John Milton: as the imposing precursor figure whose shadow he must disown or destroy in order to establish his own legitimacy. HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1834 The 2d volume, on water birds, of Professor Thomas Nuttall’s A MANUAL OF THE ORNITHOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES AND OF CANADA (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown; Boston: Hilliard, Gray). He resigned as curator of the Botanical Garden of Harvard in order to accompany the Wyeth Expedition to the Pacific coast. NUTTALL’S WATER BIRDS Horatio Cook Meriam received his A.M. degree from Harvard College: Horatio Cook Meriam; LL.B. 1831; A.M. 1834 1872 HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL NEW “HARVARD MEN” James Russell Lowell matriculated at Harvard. John Witt Randall graduated from Harvard, and would study medicine. He was described by a classmate of that time: “Though among us, he was not wholly of us, but seemed to have thoughts, pursuits and aspirations to which we were strangers.” The Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard began the long-term task of editing a 10-volume series (Boston: Hilliard, Gray; London: Kennett) –and then a 15-volume series– of THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. I HDT WHAT? INDEX JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1837 August 31, Thursday: La preghiera di un popolo, a hymn by Gaetano Donizetti for solo voices, chorus and orchestra, was performed for the initial time, in Teatro San Carlo, Naples. At noon, at University Hall in Cambridge, 200 academics lined up in their pecking order and marched west, to the music of a band, into the 1st Parish Church that had been erected where Mrs. Anne Hutchinson had been examined before her exile for heresy. In this structure they intended to hear an address “Man Thinking” by the Reverend Waldo Emerson,2 an honorary member of the society who had been retained at the eleventh hour (after they had been turned down by the orator of their choice). THE LIST OF LECTURES The records of that society assert that the Reverend Emerson’s oration, of 1¼ hour, was “in the misty, dreamy, unintelligible style of Swedenborg, Coleridge, and Carlyle.” The last paragraph of this address included a quote from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, here rendered in boldface: 2.
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