Page 66 - Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor

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.