James Russell Lowell and His Friends by Edward Everett Hale

One cannot conceive more fortunate or charming conditions than those of the boyhood and early education of James Russell Lowell. You may study the babyhood and boyhood of a hundred poets and not find one home like his. His father, the Rev. Charles Lowell, was the minister of a large parish in Boston for more than fifty years. Before James was born, Dr. Lowell had moved his residence from Boston to Cambridge, to the home which his children afterwards called Elmwood. So much of Mr. Lowell's poetry refers to this beautiful place, as beautiful now as it was then, that even far-away readers will feel a personal interest in it.

The house, not much changed in the last century, was one of the Cambridge houses deserted by the Tory refugees at the time of the Revolution. On the steps of this house Thomas Oliver, who lived there in 1774, stood and heard the demand of the freeholders of Middlesex County when they came to bid him resign George the Third's commission. The king had appointed him lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts and president of the council. But by the charter of the province councilors were to be elected. Thomas Oliver became, therefore, an object of public resentment. A committee of gentlemen of the county waited on him on the morning of September 2, 1774, at this house, not then called Elmwood. At their request he waited at once on General Gage in Boston, to prevent the coming of any troops out from town to meet the Middlesex yeomanry. And he was able to report to them in the afternoon that no troops had been ordered, "and, from the account I had given his Excellency, none would be ordered."