SOURCE: “James Russell Lowell,” in The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism, edited by Joel Myerson, The Modern Language Association of America, 1984, pp. 336-42.

In the following essay, Wortham considers Lowell's writings concerning the New England Transcendentalists.

Time and place made James Russell Lowell in many respects one with the Transcendentalists: intellectual temperament—he called it a “Toryism of the nerves”—kept him apart, but the personal associations still weighed heavily. Lowell's respect and admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular increased over the years until his praise in “Emerson the Lecturer” took on messianic dimensions: “Emerson awakened us,” Lowell wrote in 1868; he “saved us from the body of this death.” Several years later, out of a sense of irreparable debt, Lowell dedicated to Emerson his most distinguished and enduring collection of literary essays, Among My Books: Second Series (1876). None of the other men and women associated...