ood was built before the Revolution by Thomas Oliver, the Tory
governor, who signed his abdication at the invitation of a committee
of "about four thousand people" who surrounded his house at Cambridge.
The property was confiscated by the Commonwealth and used by the
American army during the war. In 1818 it was purchased by the Rev.
Charles Lowell, pastor of the West Congregational Church in Boston,
and after ninety years it is still the family home. Here was born,
February 22, 1819, James Russell Lowell, with surroundings most
propitious for the nurturing of a poet-soul. Within the stately home
there was a refined family life; the father had profited by the
unusual privilege of three years' study abroad, and his library of
some four thousand volumes was not limited to theology; the mother,
whose maiden name was Spence and who traced her Scotch ancestry back
to the hero of the ballad of _Sir Patrick Spens_, taught her children
the good old ballads and the romantic stories in the _Fairie Queen_,
and it was one of the poet's earliest delights to recount the
adventures of Spenser's heroes and heroines to his playmates.

An equally important influence upon his early youth was the
out-of-door life at Elmwood. To the love of nature his soul was early
dedicated, and no American poet has more truthfully and beautifully
interpreted the inspired teachings of nature, whispered through the
solemn tree-tops or caroled by the happy birds. The open fields
surrounding Elmwood and the farms for miles around were his familiar
playground, and furnished daily adventures for his curious and eager
mind. The mere delight of this experience with nature, he says, "made
my childhood the richest part of my life. It seems to me as if I had
never seen nature again since those old days when the balancing of a
yellow butterfly over a thistle bloom was spiritual food and lodging
for a whole forenoon." In the _Cathedral_ is an autobiographic passage
describing in a series of charming pictures some of those choice hours
of childhood:

"One summer hour abides, what time I perched,
Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves,
And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof
An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled,
Denouncing me an alien and a thief."

Quite like other boys Lowell was subjected to the processes of the
more formal education of books. He was first sent to a "dame school,"
and then to the private school of William Wells