Biography of Percival Lowell

CHAPTER I. Childhood and Youth

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

The particular assortment of qualities a man inherits, from among the miscellaneous lot his ancestors no doubt possessed and might have transmitted, is of primary importance to him. In this Percival Lowell was fortunate. From his father’s family he derived a very quick apprehension, a capacity for intellectual interests, keen and diversified, and a tireless joy in hard mental labor; while from his mother’s people he drew sociability, ease of companionship and charm; from both families a scorn of anything mean or unworthy, a business ability and the physical health that comes from right living. His life is the story of the use he made of these heirlooms.

The son of Augustus Lowell and Katharine Bigelow (Lawrence), Percival Lowell was born in Boston on March 13, 1855, at 131 Tremont Street where the Shepard stores now stand. The region was then residential, and his parents went there so that his mother might be near her father, the Hon. Abbott Lawrence, whose house was on Park Street, now the main portion of the Union Club. He had fallen ill since his return as Minister to England, and was now failing fast. Percival was her first-born, but others followed rapidly, involving removal to larger quarters; first to Park Square, and then to 81 Mount Vernon Street, where even the games of little boys were tinged by the overshadowing events of the day,—the drilling and the battles of the Civil War. He went to a dame school kept by Miss Fette; and being always a good scholar learned what he should; for he developed normally. After infancy the summer was spent at Beverly in the pleasures and occupations of early childhood.

But in the spring of 1864 there came a sudden change. His mother was far from well, and losing ground so fast that his father was advised to take her abroad for a complete change as her only chance,—a heroic remedy which proved in time successful. So the family sailed in the Africa, a paddle-wheel steamer of 2500 tons with the sails of a full-rigged ship,—the father with an invalid wife, four children aged from nine to two, a nurse sea-sick all the time; and in addition the care of three more children of a friend in Europe, with a nurse who was well, but bereft of sense. However, they arrived safely, spent the summer in England, and, as all Americans did in those days, went to Paris for the winter.

Here Percival began a life different from that of his contemporaries at home; for with his younger brother and his cousin, George P. Gardner,—one of the children who had crossed with him on the Africa—he went to a French boarding school kept by a Mr. Kornemann. We were allowed to come home for Sundays, but spent the rest of the week at the school,—a very wise arrangement; for, although there were some English boys, the atmosphere was French, and we learned the language easily, by the native method of teaching it. To Percival this was a great benefit throughout his life.

Two winters were spent in this way, the intervening summer being passed by the family in travel. In the spring of 1866 his parents proposed to go for a few weeks to Italy, and take the children with them; but Percival was so ill at ease in travel that he was left at the famous boarding school kept by the Silligs at Vevey. Although in mature life a constant traveller, this event was not out of character, for not being yet old enough to enjoy the results of travel, or feel the keen interest in them later aroused, he was too restless to find pleasure in long journeying without an object. On their return from Italy the family picked him up and went to Germany, where they were caught by the seven weeks’ war with Austria. When it broke out they were at Schwalbach in Nassau, one of the smaller states that took sides against Prussia. Percival always remembered vividly what he there saw, exciting enough for a small boy; the sudden clatter of a galloping horse, as a man in civilian dress passed the hotel up a small lane to the left. It was the burgomaster carrying word of Prussian advance, followed quickly by the sound of several more horses, and three videttes in blue galloped past, turning up the main road in front of the hotel where they supposed the burgomaster had gone. Up the road they went and disappeared round a turn to the left at the top of the slope. Scarcely had they vanished when a squad of green-clad Nassau infantry appeared, and following half-way up the hill hid behind a wood pile. It was not long before the Prussian videttes, having failed to find the burgomaster, came into sight again, leisurely walking their horses down the road. When abreast of the wood pile the Nassau squad stole out, firing from the hip in the manner of the day. Whether they hit anyone we never knew, but the enemy was wholly dispersed, for one of the horsemen wheeled up the hill, another spurred his horse down past the hotel, and the third jumped his over the wall into the garden of the baths. That afternoon a Nassau regiment marched into the town and bivouacked in the streets, leaving in the morning to be replaced later in the day by a Prussian regiment, which in its turn marched off to its rendezvous near Kissingen.

By the end of the summer of 1866 Mother was well enough to go home, and the whole family sailed for Boston. Percival’s education there was of the ordinary classical type preparatory for college, for one year at a school kept by a Mr. Fette, brother of his teacher in childhood, and then for five years in that of Mr. George W. C. Noble, whose influence, both by teaching and character, was strong with all boys capable of profiting thereby. Percival was always near the top of his class, especially in the Classics, which he acquired so easily that while playing with a toy boat, in a shallow pond made by the melting snow on the lawn at Brookline, it occurred to him to describe an imaginary shipwreck thereof; and he did so in some hundreds of Latin hexameter verses.

In the spring of 1867 Father bought the place at the corner of Heath and Warren Streets in Brookline, where he lived until his death in 1900; and where his last child, Amy, passed her whole life. Here Percival spent his boyhood, summer and winter, until he went to college, enjoying the life and sports of the seasons; and, in fact, he was a normal boy like his comrades, only more so. During the earlier years Father drove us into town and out again each day, he going to his office and the children to school. On the road he talked on all subjects and we learned much in this way. Somehow he made us feel that every self-respecting man must work at something that is worth while, and do it very hard. In our case it need not be remunerative, for he had enough to provide for that; but it must be of real significance. I do not know that he ever said this formally, but, by the tenor of his conversation and his own attitude toward life, he impressed that conviction deeply upon the spirit. From his own active and ambitious nature, Percival little required such a stimulus; and, indeed, he struck out an intellectual path of his own in boyhood. He took to astronomy, read many books thereon, had a telescope of his own, of about two and a quarter inches in diameter, with which he observed the stars from the flat roof of our house; and later in life he recalled that with it he had seen the white snow cap on the pole of Mars crowning a globe spread with blue-green patches on an orange ground. This interest he never lost, and after lying half-dormant for many years it blazed forth again as the dominant one in his life, and the field of his remarkable achievements.

The two years of school in Paris certainly had not retarded his progress, if, indeed, the better European discipline had not advanced it; for he could have been prepared for college at sixteen, but it was thought well to extend the time another year and fill in with other things. Strangely enough, Mr. Noble thought him not so strong as he might be in two subjects where he later excelled,—English Composition and Mathematics,—and in these he was tutored the year before entering college. Later he thought he had been misjudged, but one may suspect it was rather because his interest in these matters had not been aroused. The capacity was there but not yet awakened. However, he entered college in the autumn of 1872 not only clear but with honors in Mathematics. In fact he studied that subject every year in college, took second-year honors in it, and Professor Benjamin Peirce, the great mathematician, spoke of him as one of the most brilliant scholars ever under his observation, hinting to him that if he would devote himself thereto he could succeed him in his chair. Yet it was by no means his sole field of knowledge, for he elected courses also in the Classics, Physics and History, doing well enough in all of them to be in the Φ Β Κ and have a Commencement part. An impression of his versatility is given by the fact that in his senior year he won a Bowdoin Prize for an essay on “The Rank of England as a European Power from the Death of Elizabeth to the Death of Anne,” and spoke his part on “The Nebular Hypothesis.”

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