James Russell Lowell was born on the 22d of February, 1819, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Elmwood, the home of the Lowells, was to the west of the village of Cambridge, quite near Mount Auburn cemetery.  When James Russell was a boy, Elmwood was practically in the country, and was surrounded on nearly all sides by woods, meadows, and pastures.  The house stood on a triangular piece of land surrounded by a very high and thick hedge, made up of all sorts of trees and shrubs, such as pines, spruces, willows, and oaks, with smaller shrubs at the bottom so as to form a thick wall of green.  In front of the house were some fine English elms, quite different from the American variety, and from these the house got its name.  It was a large, square, old-fashioned wooden house, and though it had stood for over a hundred years, it remained during Lowell’s life in perfect condition.

The house was surrounded by a fine, well-kept lawn, and at the back were pasture, orchard, and garden, while half a mile away lay Fresh Pond, the haunt of herons and other shy birds and land creatures.  From the upper windows one could look out on beautiful Mount Auburn cemetery, which was to the south, while to the east was a low hill called Symonds’s Hill, beyond which could be seen a bright stretch of the Charles River.

Elmwood faced on a lane, between two roads.  In his essay in “Fireside Travels,” entitled “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” Lowell describes the scene towards the village as it was in his childhood.  Approaching “from the west, by what was then called the New Road (it is called so no longer, for we change our names whenever we can, to the great detriment of all historical association), you would pause on the brow of Symonds’s Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid.  In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts....  Over it rose the noisy belfry of the college, the square brown tower of the church, and the slim yellow spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable characteristic of New England religious architecture.  On your right the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow.  Over these marshes, level as water but without its glare, and with softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly rounded hills.  To your left upon the Old Road you saw some half dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward.”  One of these, the largest and most stately, was the Craigie House, famous as the headquarters of Washington in 1776, and afterwards as the home of Longfellow.  And at the end of the New Road toward Cambridge was a row of six fine willows, which had remained from the stockade built in early days as a defense against the Indians.

And here is Harvard Square, where stand the buildings of the famous college: