The year 1848 was one of remarkably productive results for Lowell.  Besides the Biglow Papers and some forty magazine articles and poems, he published a third collection of Poems, the Vision of Sir Launfal, and the Fable for Critics.  The various phases of his composite genius were nearly all represented in these volumes.  The Fable was a good-natured satire upon his fellow authors, in which he touched up in rollicking rhymed couplets the merits and weaknesses of each, not omitting himself, with witty characterization and acute critical judgment; and it is still read for its delicious humor and sterling criticism.  For example, the lines on Poe will always be quoted: 

    “There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
    Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.”

And so the sketch of Hawthorne: 

    “There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare
    That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;
    A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,
    So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet,
    Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet.”

Lowell was now living in happy content at Elmwood.  His father, whom he once speaks of as a “Dr. Primrose in the comparative degree,” had lost a large portion of his property, and literary journals in those days sent very small checks to young authors.  So humble frugality was an attendant upon the high thinking of the poet couple, but this did not matter, since the richest objects of their ideal world could be had without price.  But clouds suddenly gathered over their beautiful lives.  Four children were born, three of whom died in infancy.  Lowell’s deep and lasting grief for his first-born is tenderly recorded in the poems She Came and Went and the First Snow-Fall.  The volume of poems published in 1848 was “reverently dedicated” to the memory of “our little Blanche,” and in the introductory poem addressed “To M.W.L.” he poured forth his sorrow like a libation of tears: 

    “I thought our love at fall, but I did err;
    Joy’s wreath drooped o’er mine eyes:  I could not see
    That sorrow in our happy world must be
    Love’s deepest spokesman and interpreter.”

The year 1851-52 was spent abroad for the benefit of Mrs. Lowell’s health, which was now precarious.  At Rome their little son Walter died, and one year after their return to Elmwood sorrow’s crown of sorrow came to the poet in the death of Mrs. Lowell, October, 1853.  For years after the dear old home was to him The Dead House, as he wrote of it: 

    “For it died that autumn morning
      When she, its soul, was borne
    To lie all dark on the hillside
      That looks over woodland and corn.”