Maria White Lowell and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn

“ It dawned in the light of love when (possibly at Concord, where she sometimes visited, in the home of Miss Anne Whiting, or at Squire Hoar's) Lowell first appreciated the gentle beauty of Maria White. She had accepted the extreme views of the emancipationists, like Anne Phillips, Maria Weston Chapman, Augusta King, Jane Whiting and Sophia and Helen Thoreau; and it was not long before her lover joined the ranks of the same party, and became the junior laureate of the Abolitionists,—Whittier being his senior in office, but not so enthusiastically Garrisonian. ”

“ Whose intellect is equalled but by few,
Should strive for what he'd weep to find were true!
Lowell had lived in Concord near Judge Hoar and Colonel Whiting, and had frequented Emerson's house, at the east end of the village, where the Turnpike left the main Lexington road (now Massachusetts Avenue) , up and down which the Redcoats had marched on that eventful 19th of April, which, opened the War of Independence. In years ensuing, Lowell followed Emerson in that path of literary independence which led New England away from servile imitation of English models ”

“ 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. ”