f wood, and is
eminently picturesque. The tone of the rooms is sombre, and the
furniture is antique and solid. Nearly everything remains as it was in
the poet's childhood; although the study has been removed from the
second floor to two connected rooms on the first, spacious and
impressive, and lined with well-selected books. The poet has lived in
this house throughout his entire life,--a thing which seldom happens to
an American citizen. In the hall are ancestral portraits, a stately
Dutch clock, and the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Lowell taken by Page in
their youth. The grounds about Elmwood have been kept as nearly as
possible in a state of nature. They are ample, and filled with
magnificent trees. The elms of Cambridge are among the most beautiful to
be found anywhere, and on this estate, though not very numerous, there
are fine specimens. In front of the house are splendid ash-trees, and a
thick hedge of trees surrounds the whole enclosure. This hedge bristles
with pines, droops with willows, and is overtopped by gigantic
horse-chestnuts. Near the house are pines, elms, lilacs, syringas; and
at the back, apple and pear trees. Huge masses of striped grass light up
the thick turf here and there; and all over the grounds the birds,
unmolested from time immemorial, build and sing in perfect freedom and
content. Long ago Longfellow sang of the herons of Elmwood, and they are
still to be found in the wooded slopes behind the house, where the
Lowell children played in their happy childhood.

Mr. Lowell entered Harvard College in his sixteenth year, and, though
never what was called a brilliant student, was graduated in due time,
and entered upon the study of law. He passed through the usual course
and took his degree of LL. B., but he was not noted for his love of
study in the law school, more than in college. He was noted for his love
of reading in both places, but it was of books outside the established
course. His literary bent was strongly marked from the first, and his
poetic talent developed itself at an early day. When only twenty-two
years of age he published his first volume of poems, much like the
youthful poems of other bards, and far inferior to the work of Bryant at
the same age. Three years later he put forth a volume of verses much
more worthy of his genius, some of them being favorites still,--like the
"Shepherd of King Admetus," "The Forlorn," "The Heritage," which
achieved the immortality of the school-bo