Any one who will read _An Indian Summer Reverie_ will discover how
affectionately Lowell dwelt on the scenes of nature and life amidst
which he grew up. Indeed, it would be a pleasant task to draw from the
full storehouse of his poetry the golden phrases with which he
characterizes the trees, meadows, brooks, flowers, birds, and human
companions that were so near to him in his youth and so vivid in his
recollection. In his prose works also a lively paper, _Cambridge
Thirty Years Ago_, contains many reminiscences of his early life.

To know any one well it is needful to inquire into his ancestry, and
two or three hints may be given of the currents that met in this poet.
On his father's side he came from a succession of New England men who
for the previous three generations had been in professional life. The
Lowells traced their descent from Percival Lowell,--a name which
survives in the family,--of Bristol, England, who settled in Newbury,
Massachusetts, in 1639. The great-grandfather was a minister in
Newburyport, one of those, as Dr. Hale says, "who preached sermons
when young men went out to fight the French, and preached sermons
again in memory of their death when they had been slain in battle."
The grandfather was John Lowell, a member of the Constitutional
Convention of Massachusetts in 1780. It was he who introduced into the
Bill of Rights a phrase from the Bill of Rights of Virginia, "All men
are created free and equal," with the purpose which it effected of
setting free every man then held as a slave in Massachusetts. A son of
John Lowell and brother of the Rev. Charles Lowell was Francis Cabot
Lowell, who gave a great impetus to New England manufactures, and from
whom the city of Lowell took its name. Another son, and thus also an
uncle of the poet, was John Lowell, Jr., whose wise and far-sighted
provision gave to Boston that powerful centre of intellectual
influence, the Lowell Institute. Of the Rev. Charles Lowell, his son