kly gathered. From the nobility to
the peasants, who stood at their doors to see her pass by, she was
everywhere received as one who had done noble work for the cause of
freedom. In England she met with the same enthusiasm, and, both from
England and Scotland she received large sums of money to be used for
the advancement of the anti-slavery cause in America. Mrs. Stowe has
left a sketch of this pleasant episode in her life in a little work
called _Sunny Memories_.

Some years later she purchased a winter home in Florida, and here she
erected a building to be used as church and school-house by the poorer
inhabitants. In this she conducted Sunday-school, singing and sewing
classes. Her pleasant experiences in her Southern home are embodied in
a series of sketches called _Palmetto Leaves_.

On the seventieth anniversary of her birthday her publishers arranged
a garden party in her honor, to which were invited all the literary
celebrities of America. It calls up a pleasant picture to think of her
thus surrounded by the distinguished men and women who had gathered to
do honor not only to her work for literature, but to that nobility of
soul that had made her long life a service for others.

Whittier, Holmes, and many others contributed poems on this occasion.

In American literature Mrs. Stowe stands as its chief woman
representative before the Civil War, taking high place by right among
the novelists whose sphere is the presentation of national life.

CHAPTER XV

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

1819-1892

James Russell Lowell was born on the 22d of February, 1819, at
Cambridge, Mass. Fate had willed that he, beyond all other writers,
was to preserve a certain phase of Yankee life and make it the
treasure of futurity, and the Cambridge of his early boyhood was the
best training he could have received for such a mission.

The then unpretentious village, with its quiet streets shaded with
elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, was revered throughout New England
as the home of Harvard College, but it was much more than that. It
was a little world in which still lingered all the quaintness and
simplicity of early New England life, and Lowell, imbibing these
influences unconsciously in childhood, was able afterward to reproduce
their flavor in his literary work and thus preserve them from
oblivion. The birthplace of Lowell was Elmwood, a charming
country-seat formerly occupied by a Tory tax-collector, who had
emigrated on