James Russell Lowell and His Friends by Edward Everett Hale

Lowell first saw Maria White on the first of December, 1839. At the moment, I suppose, he did not know that it was preordained that they two should be one. Mr. Norton has hunted out an early letter of his which he wrote the day after that meeting: "I went up to Watertown on Saturday with W. A. White, and spent the Sabbath with him. His sister is a very pleasant and pleasing young lady, and knows more poetry than any one I am acquainted with. I mean, she is able to repeat more. She is more familiar, however, with modern poets than with the pure wellsprings of English poesy. " The truth is that their union was made in heaven, that it was a perfect marriage, that they belonged together and lived one life. She was exquisitely beautiful; her tastes and habits were perfectly simple; her education, as I look back on what I know of it, seems to me as perfect as any education can be.

Among other experiences which did her no harm, she was one of the frightened girls who fled from the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown before it was destroyed by a mob, in 1834. Her mother was one of the most charming women who ever lived. A cluster of sisters, of all ages down to romping little girls, young women of exquisite sensitiveness and character, and with such a training as such a mother would be sure to give, made the great Watertown house the most homelike of homes. In such a home Lowell found his beautiful wife, and they loved each other from the beginning.