Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[148] the House of their birth. It would be impossible to say that the Cambridge influence entered more strongly into Lowell than into Holmes, but it was in Lowell's case less concentrated upon early years and more distributed over his life. One of his most attractive traits was his passionate love of his birthplace, and although Matthew Arnold pitied him for being obliged to return to it from Londqn, he was really nowhere else so happy. This could not have been the case had not the residence been fortunate in itself.

Multitudes of persons now visit Elmwood every year, and there are few who do not feel its charm. Yet this affords no picture of what the region was in Lowell's day, when the whole Road connecting it with “the village” was merely dotted here and there with other stately colonial houses like itself. On Mt. Auburn Street, then called “the New Road,” there was no House whatever until the village was nearly reached; and even on Brattle Street the south side was houseless until the old Vassall House blocked the way. It was the region not merely, as Professor Norton says, of “pasture land or ”