JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL was born at Cambridge, Mass., February 22, 1819. He graduated at Harvard College. In 1855 he succeeded Longfellow as Professor of Modern Languages and Belles-lettres in Harvard. At this time (1882) Lowell is United States Minister to England. He belongs to a family noted for literary attainments. Judge Lowell, his grandfather, and Dr. Chas. Lowell, his father, were both highly accomplished. Several other relatives were men of culture, and J. R. Lowell has more than sustained the eminence of his ancestors and relatives. His wife, nee Maria White, was a poetess of excellent ability.

At the age of twenty-two, Lowell commenced his work as author by the publication of a volume of poems entitled A Year's Life. The following gives the principal part of his literary record:-In 1844 appeared Poems; ' 1845, Conversations on some of the Old Poets; 1848, third series of Poems, and the Bigelow Papers; 1869, Under the Willows and other Poems, and the Cathedral, an Epic Poem; 1870, prose essays entitled Among my Books; 1871, My Study Window. Lowell has also edited the poems of Marvel, Donne, Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley, and lectured on the British Poets.

In the Bigelow Papers, Lowell's genius appears to good advantage. "His humor is rich and original.' He has no superior as a humorist, and he is one of the greatest critics the world has ever produced. One writer thinks that his learning and thought-power have spoiled a great poet to make a great critic. He excels in everything he undertakes. The following, from The Present Crisis, shows the broad and manly sweep of Lowell's powerful pen:

When a deed is done for freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast

Runs a

thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to

west,

And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him

climb

To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime

Of a century, bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of time!