LETTER OF MARIA WHITE (MRS. JAMES RUSSELL) LOWELL TO SOPHIA (MRS. NATHANIEL) HAWTHORNE
With Remarks by F. B. Sanborn
Mr. Bixby, with his usual good taste and good fortune, has obtained one of the most charming letters of Maria White, the early love and first wife of the poet Lowell, to her slightly elder friend, the wife of the prose poet, Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was written from Philadelphia, whither the young couple had gone the year after their marriage in 1844, as a favorable city for Lowell's chosen pursuit of poet and magazine writer. At their marriage, Lowell was twenty-five and Miss White (of Watertown) was twenty-three. They did not become acquainted until in 1839-40, though their homes were hardly more than a mile apart—Lowell living with his father, the Reverend Doctor Lowell, at Elmwood, an old Tory mansion, which had become the property of Gerry, one of the Signers of
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