Page:Letter of Maria White (Mrs. James Russell) Lowell to Sophia (Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne; with remarks by F. B. Sanborn.djvu/15

 Old Manse, which, in Autumn, 1845, the Hawthornes were about leaving for Boston and Salem. Nothing could surpass the delicacy and elegance of Maria Lowell, as testified by her friends, of whom I knew scores, though I never saw her. She was an invalid when I first knew the Lowell family, and was abroad when I went to reside at Cambridge in 1852-3; and she died in 1853. But the portraits of the young wedded poets had been painted by their friend, the artist Page; and in one of the rooms of Mrs. Anna Lowell, the mother of Charles Lowell, whom I knew in college, and of his brother James,—both killed in the Civil War,—hung for a year or two the picture of Maria White. I often visited there, and became familiar with her features. She wrote verse easily, and with deep sentiment and a certain feminine grace, not always found in her husband's poems. Few, perhaps none, of her poems were published in her lifetime, but in 1855, her bereaved husband privately printed a thin volume, now lying before me; and occasionally, while editing the Atlantic Monthly, from 1857 onward, he allowed one to appear there. Here is one I have always esteemed the best, [ 7 ]