coach with a single fellow-passenger, apparently a gentleman, who took his place with her on the back seat, and who, after a time, pretending to be asleep, fell over towards her, so that his head lay on her shoulder, but, correcting himself, sat upright again, to repeat the feint again and again, each time with more abandon, until his arm dropped behind Fannie’s waist, with an unmistakable attempt to embrace her.  She quietly drew out her shawl-pin and drove it into his arm, without any remark or other attention to him.  He sat up instantly, at the next stopping-place took an outside seat, and discontinued his journey at the first town they came to.

Mrs. Lowell fitted her husband as sunshine fits calm, and the gravest sorrow he ever felt with her was her having no children.  When, two or three years after the time I am now writing of, I had decided to go to Europe again, and he tried to dissuade me from going, and I, for reasons I could not tell him, persisted, he brought me one day, just before I sailed, six hundred dollars, insisting on my accepting it as a gift, saying:  “I shall never want it.  I know now that I shall never have another child, and I can well spare it.”  Lowell had never been wealthy, but he had an income sufficient for all needs in the state of life which he preferred, and his generosity towards his friends who were poorer than he took all the surplus.  He rejoiced in the addition to his income in the salary of his professorship, but it added nothing to his own expenditure.  And yet I have always felt that if he had been a poor man, compelled to work for his daily bread, he would have occupied a larger place in the world of letters.  He was not one of the “intellectual giants buried under mountains of gold,” but he was a greater man than he ever showed him self, always cushioned by a sufficiency of fortune for all his needs, and by his tastes inclined to a simple and tranquil life; for, though he became later a political personage, he cared little, au fond, for the political world.  Perhaps the little was too much for his attainment as a poet, and some of his best friends have always held that his diplomatic life was a disaster for his intellectual completion.

I have elsewhere alluded to his going to Europe to complete the preparations to enter into his professorship, and when he came back from this voyage he said to me, “I must study yet a good deal before I attempt to produce anything more.”  He finally felt the carelessness of form in his work, and in the succeeding years he worked very hard in his professorial work, which was, perhaps, not the best for his advancement as an author, but it certainly gave more solidity to the production of those years which intervened between his simpler life and his diplomatic career.  His lectures before the students and the public (the popularity of Lowell as a lecturer was immense) solidified an education which, as he himself humorously avowed, was often broken by freaks of irrepressible youthful spirit;