“The Dead House,” “Auf Wiedersehen (Summer)” and the “Palinode (Autumn),” in which the first grief had deepened while losing its acuteness, and the feeling of loneliness had taken largely the place of the first desolation, the wrenching apart of soul and body:—­

  “It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,—­
  That jar of our earth, that dull shock
  When the ploughshare of deeper passion
  Tears down to our primitive rock;”

and some of his friends had tried the folly of condolence, to whom he replies, in the same poem ("After the Burial"):—­

  “Console if you will, I can bear it;
  ’Tis a well-meant alms of breath;
  But not all the preaching since Adam
  Has made Death other than Death.”

But the man was too robust in body and mind to linger long in the shadows of melancholy, and though the effects of bereavement—­which, in the few years before I knew him, had taken his only boy, who died in Rome, his elder daughter, of whose death “The First Snow-Fall” keeps a touching record, and finally his wife—­deepened his character as expressed in his subsequent writing, the buoyancy and elasticity which he found in his enjoyment of nature, and his severe application to the studies of the new position to which the retirement of Longfellow from the professorship of modern languages at Harvard promoted him, restored his old tone of life, while his very happy marriage with his second wife made him, as may now be said without indiscretion, happier than he had ever been.

The second Mrs. Lowell was a woman of the rarest mental, moral, and personal qualities, and her influence on Lowell was of the happiest and sunniest.  She was one of three daughters of a merchant of Maine, who had left them without other resources than what their own excellent education gave them, and with the charge of a younger brother, for whose education they provided after the New England way.  The other sisters I never knew; but Fannie, Mrs. Lowell, was one of the most remarkable women I ever knew for the combination of resolute and persistent courage and serene religious temperament.  She was a Swedenborgian, and probably owed to that form of faith her serenity and imperturbable faith in a Divine Providence; but her unflinching courage in adversity and her extreme sweetness of character were of her New England birth and education.  After her father’s death she became a governess, and came to Lowell’s house in that capacity after the death of his wife; but she had, before that, gone through many vicissitudes of fortune.  She told me one day an incident of travel which is worth recording as indicating her character.  She had been in a situation in Charleston, S.C., and had accepted another in the valley of the Ohio, to reach which, there being then no railway that traversed the distance, she had to make a long journey by stagecoach, traveling day and night across the Alleghanies.  One night she found herself in the