It was in the late summer and early fall of 1876, also, when the political fight was hottest, that Lowell peppered the enemy with the half-dozen epigrams of which he preserved only one, “A Misconception.” The allusions in some were to passing incidents, so that footnotes to his two-line epigrams would now be needed. Some with good memory will need no key to unlock this:—

THE WIDOW’S MITE.

But the most definite public expression of his political thought at this time may be found in the draft of a speech at a caucus in Cambridge which Lowell preserved among his papers. Apparently Lowell wrote this out in advance, but it is not likely that he imported into a political caucus the very academic method of reading a speech.

“I do not propose,” he says, “to make a speech. Still less shall I try to captivate your ears or win your applauses by any of those appeals to passion and prejudice which are so tempting and so unwise. Politics are the most serious of all human affairs, and I prefer the approval of your understandings to that of your hands and feet.

“The presidential contest of this year is in some respects unlike any other that I remember. Both parties claim to be in favor of the same reforms in our currency and our civil service, and both have nominated men of character and ability for the highest office in our government. Meanwhile there is a much larger class of voters than usual who are resolved to cast their ballots less in reference to party ties than to what in their judgment is the interest of the whole country. The two parties are so evenly balanced that the action of this class is of supreme importance. Among these are doubtless some wrongheaded men, some disappointed ones, and some who think that any change, no matter what, may be for the better and cannot be for the worse. But in general these dissatisfied persons are men of more than average thoughtfulness, weight of character, and influence. They feel profoundly that the great weakness of the democratical form of government, as they have studied its workings in this country, is a great and growing want of responsibility in officials, whether to the head of the government or to the country, a great and growing indifference (in the selection of candidates) to the claims of character as compared with those of partisan efficiency or unscrupulousness. We hear, to be sure, of responsibility to the People, but in practice this amounts to very little. Just before election the politicians become tenderly aware of the existence of the People, they recognize their long lost brother, and rush into his arms with more than fraternal fervor. In the same way, just before the 17th of March they show a surprising familiarity with the history of St. Patrick, though at other times we should hardly suspect that their favorite study was the lives of the saints. During the rest of the year the people are busy about their own affairs, and have neither the leisure nor the inclination to be scrutinizing the conduct of their public servants. A responsibility to many is practically a responsibility to none. Now you all know that in battling with the cankerworm, it is around the stem of the tree that we apply our preventives, because that is the highway by which the grubs climb to lay their eggs. The eggs once laid there is no remedy. The stem by which our political grubs have gone up to deposit the germs of devastation has been our primary meetings and conventions, the adroit management of which has too often given us candidates without that self-respect which makes men responsible to their own conscience, and without that respect for the better sentiment of the country which might spring from the fear of lost repute and diminished consideration. They fear no loss of what they never had. The discontented class of which I have spoken are resolved to make candidates feel their responsibility at the polls, the only point at which they are sensitive. I confess that I share largely in the feeling that leads them to this determination.

“I am and have been in sympathy with the principles of the Republican party as I understand them, but it has no sacredness for me when it degenerates into a contrivance for putting unfit men or tainted men into office, and for making them ‘Honorable’ by courtesy who are not so by character. When a party becomes an organization to serve only its own private ends, when it becomes a mere means of livelihood or distinction on easier terms than God for our good has prescribed, it has become noxious instead of useful. Now, fellow-citizens, it cannot be denied that the Republican party has suffered by too long and too easy a tenure of office. We ought to be thankful to its opponents for the investigations which have shown us its weak points. Let it never be said that we object to any investigation of character. Let it always be said that we object to men who need or fear to be investigated.

“It will not do to appeal to the past history and achievements of the party. The greatest of poets and one of the wisest of men has said that—

It is by their estimate of the chances of what the party will do that independent voters will be guided in their action. It is of no use to tell them what it used to be, nor, when they resent its corruption, to say that things were as bad a hundred years ago. We had hoped the world was growing better. We would rather not need to be consoled than to have the finest consolation that was ever manufactured out of the commonplaces of history. At least I had hoped that we should never hear of poor old Judas again, whose conduct, if it be an argument for anything, would go to prove that one man in every twelve must be a knave. When our knaves follow the example of Judas by going straightway and hanging themselves, I shall not object to the recalling of his example from time to time. What we have to do is to purify the party ourselves, and this we can do only by insisting that the men who are offered for our choice shall be men of a character so well established that they are above suspicion and incapable of temptation, at least in its baser forms; we must insist on having such men, or acknowledge that our system of popular government has left us none such.

“It is said that the Republican party cannot be reformed from within. This may or may not be so, but is this less true of the Democratic party? The first printed ballot I ever saw was in Baltimore just fifty years ago, and I remember that it had upon it an American flag and ‘Hurrah for Old Hickory!’ That ‘Hurrah for Old Hickory’ introduced into our civil service that evil system which has led to all the corruption in our administration, and which, if not cured, will lead to the failure of our democratical experiment. Many people seem to think that some such divinity doth hedge a Democracy as was once supposed to hedge a king. But perpetual motion is as idle a dream in political organization as in mechanics. It is in the little wheels, in those least obvious to inspection, that the derangement is likely to begin. Are we to expect more vigilance from what used to be called the Jacksonian Democracy? I must be allowed to doubt it.

“But suppose that I am mistaken, suppose that the pretensions of the two parties as to their zeal for reforms in the Civil Service are entitled to equal weight, there are other questions to which the answer is by no means clear. How is it about honest money? about an unmercurial currency that shall not rise and fall with the temperature of Wall Street, that shall neither tempt the would-be rich to unsafe speculation nor cheat the poor of their earnings? Though neither party has been so explicit as I should think it wise to be, yet I believe our chance is on the whole better with the Republicans than with their opponents.

“But there is one other argument which with me is conclusive. Nothing, in my opinion, is more unstatesmanlike, nothing more unwise than to revive sectional animosities for political purposes. Such expedients, though used for temporary effect, are lasting in their disastrous consequences. But scarcely less disastrous would be the fallacious hopes raised in the South by the success of Mr. Tilden. We are not willing to risk any of the results of the nation’s victory. One of the most important of those results was the assertion of our indivisible nationality. Mr. Tilden and the party which he directs have always been extreme in their interpretation of the reserved rights of the individual States, going so far even as to include that of rebellion among them. Should such principles prevail, revolution would become constitutional, and we should have another Mexico instead of the country we love. We should be admitting that the war, so costly to our prosperity, so incalculably dear in hopeful lives, was both a blunder and a crime. I for one am not ready for an admission like this. I prefer to feel myself the citizen of a strong country, to feel in my veins the pulses of an invincible nationality, whereof I am a member. An indissoluble union is the chain that holds us to our anchor. Its disjointed links would be old iron for the junkshop.”

This is not what one looks for in a speech at a party caucus. Neither the independence of the speaker’s attitude nor his moderate adhesion to the party in which he enrolls himself are very effective instruments, and it is clear that despite Lowell’s sympathy with the plain man and his intimate acquaintance with him as illustrated in his “Biglow Papers,” he was embarrassed when he came to speak to him in the collectivity of a public meeting, and scarcely let his natural voice even be heard. Much must be referred, it is true, to his inexperience with speaking at public meetings—he was not a speaker in the old anti-slavery days, but his inexperience was due largely to his fastidiousness of temper which made him after all in literature rather than in life pleased with the vision of

He found his own voice more surely in his study than on the rostrum, and it is to his Fourth of July Ode in this centennial year that we must look for the most comprehensive and most natural expression of his political sentiment. In poetry he found it easiest to reiterate that faith which he had in an elemental America, as it were, a faith which was derived from a belief in God, and that

but he refuses for all that to take refuge in a mere blind confidence, admitting a little ruefully that the flight of years had won him

The democratic principle, too, which he held so stoutly comes to him now as the manifestation of human life concretely apprehended rather than theoretically conceived, and the development of his own maturer judgment appears in this resolution to find the base of national life in the men who built the nation, and not in the mere speculation of freedom and democracy.

Lowell published the three odes called out by the centennial celebrations in a little volume entitled “Three Memorial Poems,” which he inscribed to Mr. Godkin “in cordial acknowledgment of his eminent service in heightening and purifying the tone of our political thought.” At the request of his publishers he was also assembling his poems for a new and so far complete collection in what was to be known as the Household Edition. Perhaps the title was in his mind when he wrote in the fall to a correspondent who had expressed his appreciation, “I would rather be a fireside friend and the Galeotto of household love than anything else. I was especially pleased that you had found out how much better the second series of the Biglow is than the first. I had not seen them for years when I had to read them through for a new edition this summer, and I found them entertaining.”

In February, 1877, Lowell went to Baltimore to give before the Johns Hopkins University a course of twenty lectures on the literature of the Romance Languages during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with Dante as a central theme. His companion was his friend and colleague Professor Francis J. Child, who at the same time was discoursing on Chaucer. The tenth anniversary of the founding of the University was observed during their stay, and both men were the recipients of delightful hospitality, while by their lectures and readings and social gifts they made themselves most welcome guests. “J. L.’s good looks and insinuating ways,” wrote Mr. Child, “carry off the palm entirely from my genius and learning, but then I am as much fascinated as anybody, and don’t mind.” “Child goes on winning all ears and hearts,” wrote Lowell. “I am rejoiced to have this chance of seeing so much of him, for though I loved him before, I did not know how lovable he was till this intimacy.” A year later, Lowell writing to Child from Europe recalls the month as one of the pleasantest of his life. Lowell stayed with his kinsman Mr. Spence, but he found a frequent respite from the gayety in which he was involved in a quiet luncheon with his friend Mrs. Herrick, who tactfully forebore to make her luncheons additions to the social functions which excited but wearied as well.

A souvenir of the enjoyment Lowell had in his visit to Baltimore is in a sonnet which he wrote to a young daughter of President Gilman of the university. “I shall assume,” he wrote her from Elmwood, 7 April, 1877, “for my own convenience that there were just fourteen roses in the lovely sheaf I found in my room when I came in for shelter from the ill-humor of that February day, so unlike the temperature, both outward and inward, to which Baltimore had accustomed us. I repay them in fourteen verses, and I wish it were as easy to match the sweetness of your sonnet as its numbers. However, I promised you that I would send it and have not forgotten, but have had so many things to do that I have delayed paying my debt till you have half forgotten your debtor. The two quatrains with which my sonnet gets well under way were written on the spot with your roses comforting two of my benumbed senses. Luckily I wrote them on the back of an invitation which certifies to the date—‘Saturday, 24 February.’ The concluding triplets I had partly written down when I was interrupted, and I finished them this morning. I wish it were better, but at least the gratitude will last, if not the sonnet.”

TO MISS ALICE GILMAN,

WHO SENT ME ROSES, 24TH FEBY., 1877.

Not long after Lowell’s return from Baltimore rumors began to fly about that he was to have a foreign mission. Mr. Longfellow notes in his diary, 7 April, 1877: “In the afternoon Charles Norton called. We talked of Ruskin and Carlyle, and of Lowell’s having the English mission.” It was not unnatural that public attention should be called to him in connection with some diplomatic post, in view of the somewhat peculiar circumstances connected with his relations to the recent presidential election. He was one of the electors in Massachusetts upon the Republican ballot, and when the issue of the election was in doubt and many believed that Mr. Tilden was the actual choice though Mr. Hayes was nominally chosen, there were voices that called on Lowell to use his technical right and cast his vote for Mr. Tilden. It was a curious comment on affairs. It implied on the part of those who proposed it a confidence that Lowell was independent enough to use this right. I am not sure that any other elector was named who might be expected to take this responsibility. On the other hand, those who urged this course seem to have been blind to the enormous violation of faith involved in such a course. The machinery of the electoral system, however it had been designed at first, had gradually and immutably become a mere device for the registry of the popular choice; all initiative on the part of the electors was totally cancelled. Lowell himself never had any hesitation. As he wrote to Mr. Leslie Stephen: “In my own judgment I have no choice, and am bound in honor to vote for Hayes, as the people who chose me expected me to do. They did not choose me because they had confidence in my judgment, but because they thought they knew what that judgment would be. If I had told them that I should vote for Tilden, they would never have nominated me. It is a plain question of trust. The provoking part of it is that I tried to escape nomination all I could, and only did not decline because I thought it would be making too much fuss over a trifle.”

The actual facts of the appointment of Lowell to the Spanish mission have been so explicitly told by Mr. Howells, who had a grateful part to play in the transaction, that with his permission I copy his account of it. “I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a diplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly without Lowell’s privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could wish in its delicate sense of the situation. The President said that he had already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell whether he would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time in carrying his letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He saw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to come in, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran it through. When he had read it, he gave a quick ‘Ah!’ and threw it over the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and loyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might wish to say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she was intensely eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect New England character in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee, we turned into his study, without further allusion to the matter.

“A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him and make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go he said, with a sigh of vague reluctance, ‘I should like to see a play of Calderon,’ as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could still be fulfilled. ‘Upon this hint I acted,’ and in due time it was found in Washington that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.”[66] In a letter to his daughter[67] Lowell says further that he had also the choice of going to Berlin.

Mr. Evarts, the Secretary of State, was in Boston at this time, and in a personal conference the preliminary arrangement appears to have been made. Mr. Hayes also came to Boston in June, and Lowell met him and his wife, and has left a record of the impression they produced upon him, in one of his letters written shortly afterward.[68] The anticipation of this new chapter in his life seems to have given him a divided feeling. The honor of the place half amused and half pleased him. With the ingenuous pride of a college man, he thought how his name would look in capitals in the college triennial, and wished his father, who had a high sense of that dignity, could have enjoyed the sight. He was too fixed in his position before the world to be over-elated at the conspicuousness which the place brought him, and he disliked publicity so much that that side of the business filled him with a sort of dismay. He welcomed the opportunity for enlarging his Spanish studies, and he had an honest desire to represent his country well. “I believe,” he wrote to his friend Thomas Hughes, “that I can live my own life (part of the time, at least) in Madrid, and need not have any more flummery than I choose. What unsettled me first was that a good many people wished to see me sent to London, and I was persuaded that I might be of some service there by not living like a Duke, and in promoting a better understanding between the two countries. But my friends were mistaken in supposing that I had been thought of for England.... Things are going more to my mind now, and President Hayes made a most agreeable impression on me when he was here the other day. He struck me as simple, honest, and full of good feeling, a very good American to my thinking.... By all means come to Madrid. I shall have a house there, and a spare bed in it always. It would be delightful to take you a drive to the Prado in my own (hired) ambassadorial coach. My ‘Excellency’ will give me cause for much serious meditation.”

It must not be supposed, however, that the prospect was untouched with doubt. “I am by no means sure,” Lowell writes to Mr. Reverdy Johnson of Baltimore, shortly after accepting the post, “that I did wisely in accepting the Spanish mission. I really did not wish to go abroad at all, but my friends have been urgent (Godkin among them), and I go.”

Mr. and Mrs. Lowell sailed for Liverpool on the Parthia from Boston, Saturday, 14 July, 1877. The agent of the steamship company followed custom in making special provisions for the send-off of a public man, and a comment on Lowell’s incapability of filling the rôle in every respect may be read in his good-by note to his friend Mr. Norton, who had received one of the agent’s invitations: “You will laugh to-morrow, I hope, when you think of me going down the harbor with the revenue cutter and a steam tug to bring back those who can’t part with me this side the outer light. If the agent of the Cunard line had given a month’s meditation to devising what would annoy me most, he could have hit on nothing to beat this. When I got his note yesterday morning, I positively burst forth into a cold sweat. But Sunday will bring peace.” ...

CHAPTER XIV

THE SPANISH MISSION

1877-1880

The preparation which Lowell had received for efficient service as Minister of the United States to Spain certainly did not lie in the discharge of so-called political duties. To be delegate to a district convention and presidential elector would scarcely qualify one for a diplomatic post, and to many of his countrymen no doubt he seemed but a dilettante statesman. Yet he was better trained than many a man who has been more energetic in party organization. He was a fair Spanish scholar so far as familiarity with the literature goes. When he first entered on his duties he was, it is true, depressed by his inability to use the language freely; his pride was mortified with the ease with which others could use it, and both his French, of such use in diplomacy, and his Italian got in his way. But a couple of months after he had reached his post he could say: “I can talk now with comparative ease and write notes without fear of scandal. What I wanted was the familiar and every-day forms. I am getting them. But all along I have insisted on conducting my official business in Spanish, and have already astonished ’em at the Foreign Office here. They say in their Oriental way that I speak Castilian like a native and pronounce it perfectly. Of course I haven’t turned goose since I came, to believe all this, but I really am getting on.”

But if colloquial Spanish was not at first at his command, he had a very valuable instrument in his familiarity with Spanish literature. The man who knows and loves the best literature of the country to which he is accredited has the key wherewith to unlock the nature of the men with whom he has to deal. Lowell, to whom Calderon was as a nightingale in his study, was not taken unawares when asked to go to Spain. He did not need to cram for an examination. When qualifying himself for his post at Harvard, twenty years before, he had made himself acquainted with Spanish, and both his studies and his teaching since that day had led him into such an acquaintance with its language, literature, and history, that he could say playfully that he knew more Spanish than most Spaniards.

At first sight it might seem that the somewhat isolated and secluded life he had led would have disqualified Lowell for the life of a diplomat; that greater commerce with men was essential to the training of one whose business it was to deal directly with men in matters possibly of high consequences. But if Lowell was a scholar and somewhat of a recluse, it must be remembered that his most frequent converse was with picked men, and that, moreover, in his studies and reading his attention had been concentrated on literature which was expressive of great thoughts, great emotions, and great dramatic situations, so that both in life and in literature he was at home and moved with ease in high society.

In diplomatic life, the minister can scarcely escape the consciousness of his representative character. The men with whom he has most to do remind him of it; they are themselves in the same category. The reader of Shakespeare’s Histories is struck with the fine impersonation of their countries which the leading characters convey as it were in the tones of their voice. France, England, Scotland become in their impassioned language not geographical entities, nor even nations merely, but incarnate in them. So at courts, aided by the very trappings and ceremonies of their office, private gentlemen become for the nonce figures in a pageant and feel themselves such. They speak, it may be, in their natural voice, and talk for the most part with ministers of state as man to man, with friendly accent and in négligé forms even; but the consciousness of their representative function is never remote, it is always alert and ready against surprise. I suspect it becomes even more easy for a scholar than for a man of affairs to play the part well on such a stage. And it is this same sense which lies behind much of the sensitiveness as to rank and punctilio. The ambassador takes precedence of the minister; thus the minister of a great country is irritated at finding himself in the procession behind the ambassador of a country of a second order, not because his personal pride is wounded, but because his country has felt a slight. These things touch a man of the great world more than a mere man of the world. The scholar who is absolutely content with high thinking and plain living in his own home may be abnormally sensitive to appearances in the embassy over which he presides. It is an illustration of this that when at his presentation to the King there was some blunder, and Lowell was kept waiting twenty minutes beyond the hour appointed for his audience, and the introducer apologized, Lowell replied it was nothing to him personally, but it should be remembered it was not he, but the United States that was kept waiting.

Another illustration appears in the despatch which Lowell sent Mr. Evarts, 3 February, 1878, detailing the course he pursued when he received a telegram from the President congratulating the King upon his approaching marriage. “I communicated the substance of it,” he writes, “to the Minister of State and asked for an audience that I might present it in person to His Majesty. On Monday (the 21st ultimo), accordingly, I was received by King Alfonso in private audience and delivered my message, at the same time adding that it gave me particular pleasure to be the bearer of it. The King in reply desired me to convey to the President his great pleasure in receiving this expression of sympathy from the chief magistrate of a people with which he wished always to maintain and draw closer the most friendly relations. A very gracefully timed compliment to the messenger followed....

“I think that this act of courtesy on the part of the President has really given pleasure here, and has not been entirely lost in the throng of special ambassadors who have been despatched hither with numerous suites to pay the royal compliments of the occasion.

“As these special ambassadors had been received in public audience, I had some doubt whether I ought to consent, as being in this case the immediate representative of the President, to be received privately. But the time was too short for much consideration. The audience was to be at half-past one o’clock, and I received notice of it only the night before. Had it been a letter of the President, I should have insisted on its being received publicly. As it was, I thought it most prudent and graceful to admit the distinction between extraordinary ambassadors sent with great pomp to bring gifts and decorations, and a mere minister plenipotentiary, especially as it would have otherwise been impossible to deliver the message at all before the wedding. The difficulty was heightened by my having only just risen from a very severe attack of illness, which made it necessary for me to economize my strength in order to take any part at all in the ceremonies.”

To all this must surely be added, that his very abstinence from political party associations at home deepened Lowell’s sense of his position. His conception of the nation which he represented was not embarrassed by the vapors too often engendered by “practical politics.” He knew his country, as we have already seen by an examination of his political writings, and even when most full of concern for her integrity, he always kept before him the ideal of a land devoted to freedom and progress. That he was an idealist made him more readily an actor on the diplomatic stage where America met Spain when Lowell conversed with Silvela. But his idealism did not get in the way of his plain business sense. Rather it helped him and supplied that consciousness of dignity which might have forsaken him had he regarded himself merely as a business agent.

The drawback to his satisfaction with the office was his consciousness that he disliked business and was not apt at it; and business after all was what lay constantly beneath all the courtly exchange of civility. “You would have laughed,” he wrote to an intimate friend, “if you could have seen my anxiety when I had to give a receipt for an indemnity of five hundred thousand dollars. I was so afraid of making a blunder. It kept me awake night after night, even when I had signed it, and gave me such palpitations of the heart that I have had pains there ever since. It was not myself I was thinking of—but the guild—I didn’t wish another of those ‘d—d littery fellers’ to come to grief.” And to Mr. Putnam he wrote: “I like the Spaniards very well so far as I know them, and have an instinctive sympathy with their want of aptitude for business.” Of course he relied much on the subordinate officers of the legation, but he knew well that he could not leave the business to them, and he had, besides, for a while the interest in the details of a life which was novel to him, as well as the pride which would not suffer him to be a mere figure-head.

The Lowells were about a month on their way from Boston to Madrid. They spent a few days in London, and Lowell was in a holiday mood both there and in Paris, where they also made a brief halt in the same pleasant inn in the Latin Quarter in which they had been so much at home three years before. The tranquil enjoyment of little scenes which his letters from the two capitals disclose betokens a mind unvexed by many cares. He was entering upon a new and untried experience, but he was too old to feel an undue excitement, and too well poised to borrow trouble from ignorance of superficial duties. He was rid of the rather irksome and too familiar occupations of the academic life, he was yet in his freedom to assume novel responsibilities, and he set his face toward Madrid with an equanimity which was no doubt heightened by the feeling that he was not Professor Lowell on a vacation, but Minister Lowell about to realize his new function.

The Lowells reached Madrid on the fourteenth of August, and on the eighteenth of the month Lowell was presented at court, the King being at his summer residence at La Granja, about fifty miles from Madrid. He has given a brief narrative of the ceremony[69] which was his initiation into diplomatic life, and, as we have seen, he began at once his work at the legation, insisting upon using his Spanish in all negotiations. But the first few weeks in Madrid were anything but agreeable, since besides the worries of house-hunting he was tortured with gout, which after a couple of months permitted him to hobble to the office, only if he put on large walking shoes and handled a crutch.

Meantime he had found a pleasant apartment at No. 7 Cuesta de Santo Domingo, with a large endowment of sunshine. Indeed, the sunshine of Spain warmed his spirits thoroughly. “The weather,” he writes, “is beyond any I ever saw. I got out on the balcony this morning, and there was all the warmth and, what is more, all the freshness and hopefulness of spring.” And to Mr. Longfellow: “It beats Italy. Such limpidity of sky!” After he was well adjusted in his new quarters, he wrote: “Our household is truly Complutensian. Our cook is an old Alsacian woman, toothless as one of Gil Blas’s robbers. She speaks French, German, Spanish, and perhaps Arabic, for she lived eight years in Algeria. Our chambermaid, Pepa, is a brown-yellow Spaniard with an immense wad of false hair on the back of her head, like all her class here. My valet and factotum is an Italian from Trieste, speaking French, English, and Spanish. His wife (Fanny’s maid) is a Parisienne. Since Babel there have been few such chances for learning the languages. My man has four names according to the tongue I address him in, Giacomo, Santiago, Jacques, James. With Carolina I sometimes jabber a little German. Our rooms are not yet furnished, though we have been in them seven weeks. Except the dining-room. We bought ten old chairs, highbacked and covered with a flowered plush, which oddly enough exactly matched our wall-paper. They are handsome, and I believe were just finished when I bought ’em (period of Philip II.). However, they are worm-eaten, which has a savor of authenticity about it, and the maker has been more successful in reproducing the past than Mareschal McMahon seems to be. By the time I get them home, they will be genuine old Spanish chairs at any rate, and there is such a thing as considering too nicely.”

His diplomatic duties at first gave him some concern. He wrote to his daughter, 18 November, 1877: “Mamma has told you of my tribulations with gout—first in one foot, then in t’other. I could not write any letters during those six weeks. And then I had my moral acclimatization to go through with, which is not by any means ended yet. It was rather tough at first—in a perfectly strange country, the only stranger, as it were, for all my fellow-diplomats had either been here some years or had experience elsewhere;—unable to speak the language fluently, and in a labyrinth of etiquette where, as in some old gardens, if you take a step in the wrong direction you are deluged with cold water. Well, philosophy is an admirable umbrella, but when we are caught in a sudden shower it’s no use remembering how we left it standing in the corner, as we always do.”

Lowell thought himself too old to find the ceremonial parts of his occupation even amusing. They bored him; but he had a genuine human interest in the living part of what he saw and did. It was for him like reading a bit of history, not from books but from men, and it was not long before he had an opportunity of taking part in a ceremony, the marriage of the young King; and in the narrative which he gives of the event, as well as preliminary comments in despatches to the State Department, 13 December, 1877—6 February, 1878,[70] he not only gives an agreeable description of the affair, but indicates with some clearness his own personal interest as a student.

“Nowhere in the world,” he writes, “could a spectacle have been presented which recalled so various, so far-reaching, and, in some respects, so sublime associations, yet rendered depressing by a sense of anachronism, of decay, and of that unreality which is all the sadder for being gorgeous. The Roman amphitheatre (panem et circenses), the united escutcheons from whose quartering dates the downfall of Saracenic civilization and dominion in Spain; the banners of Lepanto and of the Inquisition fading together into senile oblivion on the walls of the Atocha; the names and titles that recalled the conquest of western empires, or the long defeat whose heroism established the independence of the United Provinces, and proved that a confederacy of traders could be heroic; the stage-coaches, plumed horses, blazing liveries, and running footmen of Louis Quatorze; the partisans of Philip III.’s body-guard, the three-cornered hats, white breeches, and long black gaiters of a century ago, mingled pell-mell with the French shakos and red trousers of to-day; the gay or sombre costumes from every province of Spain, some recalling the Moor and some the motley mercenaries of Lope de Figueroa; the dense and mostly silent throng which lined for miles the avenue to the church, crowding the windows with white mantillas, fringing the eaves and ridge-poles, and clustered like swarming bees on every kind of open ground;—all these certainly touched the imagination, but, in my case at least, with a chill as of the dead man’s hand that played so large a part in earlier incantations to recall the buried or delay the inevitable. There was everything to remind one of the past; there was nothing to suggest the future.

“And yet I am unjust. There were the young King and his bride radiant with spirit and hope, rehearsing the idyl which is charming alike to youth and age, and giving pledges, as I hope and believe, of more peaceful and prosperous years to come for a country which has had too much glory and too little good housekeeping. No one familiar with Spanish history, or who has even that superficial knowledge of her national character, which is all that a foreigner is capable of acquiring, can expect any sudden or immediate regeneration. The bent of ages is not to be straightened in a day by never so many liberal constitutions, nor by the pedantic application of theories drawn from foreign experience, the result of a wholly different past.

“If the ninety years since the French Revolution have taught anything, it is that institutions grow, and cannot be made to order,—that they grow out of an actual past, and are not to be conspired out of a conjectural future,—that human nature is stronger than any invention of man. How much of this lesson has been learned in Spain, it is hard to say; but if the young King apply his really acute intelligence, as those who know him best believe he will, to the conscientious exercise of constitutional powers and the steady development of parliamentary methods, till party leaders learn that an ounce of patience is worth a pound of passion, Spain may at length count on that duration of tranquillity the want of which has been the chief obstacle to her material development. Looked at in this light, the pomps of the wedding festival on the 23d of last month may be something more than a mere show. Nor should it be forgotten that here it is not the idea of Law but of Power that is rooted in the consciousness of the people, and that ceremonial is the garment of Authority....

“The ceremony over, the King and Queen, preceded by the Cabinet Ministers, the special ambassadors, and the grandees of Spain, and followed by other personages, all in coaches of state, drove at a foot-pace to the Palace, where their Majesties received the congratulations of the Court, and afterwards passed in review the garrison of Madrid. By invitation of the President of the Council, the Foreign Legations witnessed the royal procession from the balconies of the Presidency. It was a very picturesque spectacle, and yet so comically like a scene from Cinderella as to have a strong flavor of unreality. It was the past coming back again, and thus typified one of the chronic maladies of Spain. There was no enthusiasm, nothing more than the curiosity of idleness which would have drawn as great a crowd to gape at the entry of a Japanese ambassador. I heard none of the shouts of which I read in some of the newspapers the next day. No inference, however, should be drawn from this as to the popularity or unpopularity of the King. The people of the capital have been promised the millennium too often, and have been too constantly disappointed to indulge in many illusions. Spain, isolated as in many respects she is, cannot help suffering in sympathy with the commercial depression of the rest of the world, and Spaniards, like the rest of mankind, look to a change of ministry for a change in the nature of things. The internal policies of the country (even if I could hope to understand them, as I am studying to do) do not directly come within my province; but it is safe to say that Spain is lucky in having her ablest recent statesman at the head of affairs,[71] though at the cost of many other private ambitions. That he has to steer according to the prevailing set of the wind is perhaps rather the necessity of his position than the fault of his inclination. Whoever has seen the breasts of the peasantry fringed with charms older than Carthage, and relics as old as Rome, and those of the upper classes plastered with decorations, will not expect Spain to become conscious of the nineteenth century, and ready to welcome it, in a day.”

The difference between a despatch and a letter to a friend is scarcely so marked as the likeness. It is a little more studied, has a little more the air of a composition, and fewer sly asides, yet it is after all Lowell speaking of the things that interest him, rather than the American minister aware of an audience in the State Department. In the same despatch he carries forward the narrative by an account of his participation in the ceremonial bull-fight, and in this passage one might fancy him turning aside for a moment to have a few words colloquially with Mr. Evarts and half assuming Parson Wilbur’s tone.

“On Friday took place the first bull-fight, at which every inhabitant of Madrid and all foreigners commorant therein deemed it their natural right to be present. The latter, indeed, asserted that the teleological reason for the existence of legations was to supply their countrymen with tickets to this particular spectacle for nothing. Though I do not share in the belief that the sole use of a foreign minister is to save the cost of a valet de place to people who can perfectly well afford to pay for one, I did all I could to have my countrymen fare as well as the rest of the world. And so they did, if they were willing to buy the tickets which were for sale at every corner. The distribution of them had been performed on some principle unheard of out of Spain and apparently not understood even there, so that everybody was dissatisfied, most of all those who got them.

“The day was as disagreeable as the Prince of the Powers of the Air could make it, even with special reference to a festival. A furious and bitterly cold wind discharged volleys of coarse dust, which stung like sleet, in every direction at once, and seemed always to threaten rain or snow, but, unable to make up its mind as to which would be most unpleasant, decided on neither. Yet the broad avenue to the amphitheatre was continually blocked by the swarm of vehicles of every shape, size, color, and discomfort that the nightmare of a bankrupt livery stabler could have invented. All the hospitals and prisons for decayed or condemned carriages seemed to have discharged their inmates for the day, and all found willing victims. And yet all Madrid seemed flocking toward the common magnet on foot also.

“I attended officially, as a matter of duty, and escaped early. It was my first bull-fight, and will be my last. To me it was a shocking and brutalizing spectacle in which all my sympathies were on the side of the bull. As I came out I was nearly ridden down by a mounted guard, owing to my want of any official badge. For the moment I almost wished myself the representative of Liberia. Since this dreadful day 16,000 spectators who were so happy as to be present have done nothing but blow their noses and cough.”

In a private letter written after the festivities, Lowell refers to a diplomatic dinner and reception which came at the close, and says: “The uniforms (there are six special embassies here with very long tails) and diamonds were very brilliant. But to me, I confess, it is all vanity and vexation of spirit. I like America better every day.” The picturesqueness soon satisfied, and he shows in this despatch how his mind dwelt rather on the life which gave rise to and was typified in the ceremonial. He read it not at all as a supercilious American, whose pride in the barrenness of show at home might be as great as Castilian pride in superfluity of decoration, but as a scholar intent on discovering those fundamental truths of history which are seen all the more clearly through the medium of a mind at home in the rarefied air of a genuine American freedom.

Meanwhile his personal tastes led him to the book-shops and he fell to buying books, easily pardoning any extravagance he might be led into by the reflection that his treasures would go ultimately to the library of his college, where indeed they did finally rest. These dips into the refreshing waves of literature made him conscious of where his real interest lay, but he was nevertheless not a perfunctory giver of his service. “I try to do my duty,” he writes to his friend Child, “but feel sorely the responsibility to people three thousand miles away, who know not Joseph and probably think him unpractical.” By necessity of his office, he was compelled to a good deal of social activity, and this, though it brought him in contact with interesting persons, was so opposed to a long habit that it wearied him. He found himself looking critically at the society into which he was thrown. He saw little evidence of exact scholarship in the educated men, and a general disposition toward an indolent attitude regarding all important matters. But the engaging side of the Spanish character appealed to him. As he wrote to Child: “There is something oriental in my own nature which sympathizes with this ‘let her slide’ temper of the hidalgos.”

At this time he began confidentially to whisper to friends at home that he doubted if he could stand it much more than a year; but from the middle of April, 1877, he took a two months’ leave of absence and with Mrs. Lowell made an agreeable journey which brought him back in better content to his life in Madrid. They travelled first from Madrid to Tarbes, thence to Toulouse, Carcassonne, Nismes, Avignon, and Arles. From France they went to Genoa, to Pisa and to Naples, whence they took steamer to Athens, where they stayed a week or so. Lowell’s official position not only drew upon him a little official ceremony, but it tinctured his reflections also, leading him to observe and note matters which might have some bearing upon international questions or might affect in a way his own special function as minister to Spain.

“I have just come back from the Palace,” he writes to Mr. Norton from Athens, 31 May, 1878, “where I was presented to the King, a fine young Dane, good-looking and intelligent, and with whom I cannot help feeling a great deal of sympathy just now. For never was man or kingdom in a more difficult position. Greece was quite willing to make a snatch at the chestnuts in the fire, even at the risk of burning her own fingers, and they wouldn’t let her. I have seen decayed gentlemen who lived very comfortably on the former glories of their family, and drove about in an imaginary coach of their grandfathers’—but with Greece, if one can’t say exactly noblesse oblige, it at least makes her uneasy, and the laurels of Miltiades are a wakeful bed. She has an immense claim, and no resources to make it good—not even the documents that prove clear descent. It is curious, but I have not seen a face of the type that statues and medals have taught us to consider Greek. In a regiment that marched by yesterday at least seven eighths of the men, perhaps nine tenths, had the nose of the dying gladiator, which I take it is Slavonic. Yet continuity of language is certainly something, and I am so stupid that I can’t get over my astonishment at seeing the street-signs, and hearing the newspapers cried in Greek.”

A sudden opportunity to go to Constantinople shortened the stay in Athens, and Lowell had a glimpse of the Orient. “My Eastern peep,” he wrote after his return to Madrid, “has been of service in enabling me to see how Oriental Spain still is in many ways. Without the comparison I couldn’t be sure of it.”

The return of the Lowells to Madrid was just before the death of the young Queen Mercedes, and both in his despatch to the government, dated 3 July, 1878, and in his private letters, Lowell gave expression to more than merely official concern over the sudden taking-off. His despatch, in particular, is full of such details as would be noticed by one genuinely alert, and not merely carrying out the performance of official etiquette. Here, for example, are a couple of passages which show the artist and the man of feeling much more than the diplomat:—

“During the last few days of the Queen’s illness, the aspect of the city had been strikingly impressive. It was, I think, sensibly less noisy than usual, as if it were all a chamber of death in which the voice must be bated. Groups gathered and talked in undertone. About the Palace there was a silent crowd day and night, and there could be no question that the sorrow was universal and profound. On the last day I was at the Palace, just when the poor girl was dying. As I crossed the great interior courtyard, which was perfectly empty, I was startled by a dull roar, not unlike that of the vehicles in a great city. It was reverberated and multiplied by the huge cavern of the Palace court. At first I could see nothing that accounted for it, but presently found that the arched corridors all around the square were filled, both on the ground floor and the first story, with an anxious crowd, whose eager questions and answers, though subdued to the utmost, produced the strange thunder I had heard. It almost seemed for a moment as if the Palace itself had become vocal.

“At the time of the royal marriage I told you that the crowd in the streets was indifferent and silent. My own impression was confirmed by that of others. The match was certainly not popular, nor did the bride call forth any marks of public sympathy. The position of the young Queen was difficult and delicate, demanding more than common tact and discretion to make it even tenable, much more, influential. On the day of her death, the difference was immense. Sorrow and sympathy were in every heart and on every face. By her good temper, good sense, and womanly virtue, the girl of seventeen had not only endeared herself to those immediately about her, but had become an important factor in the destiny of Spain. I know very well what divinity doth hedge royal personages, and how truly legendary they become even during their lives, but it is no exaggeration to say that she had made herself an element of the public welfare, and that her death is a national calamity. Had she lived she would have given stability to the throne of her husband, over whom her influence was wholly for good. She was not beautiful, but the cordial simplicity of her manner, the grace of her bearing, her fine eyes, and the youth and purity of her face, gave her a charm that mere beauty never attains.” How the death of the Queen affected Lowell’s imagination may further be seen in the sonnet which he then wrote, but which was not published till he collected his final volume of poetry.

The furlough which Lowell had taken greatly refreshed him, and he took up his life again with vigor and gayety, applying himself not only to the duties of the legation, but to the better acquisition of the Spanish language, a fuller knowledge of the literature, and the study of those larger matters of Spanish polity and character with which it became a minister to acquaint himself. “I have come back,” he wrote to his daughter, “a new man, and have flung my blue spectacles into the paler Mediterranean. I really begin to find life at last tolerable here, nay, to enjoy it after a fashion.”

Here is an outline of his days, as he gives it in a letter to a friend: “Get up at 8, from 9 sometimes till 11 my Spanish professor, at 11 breakfast, at 12 to the legation, at 3 home again and a cup of chocolate, then read the papers and write Spanish till a quarter to 7, at 7 dinner, and at 8 drive in an open carriage in the Prado till 10, to bed at 12 to 1. In cooler weather we drive in the afternoon. I am very well,—cheerful and no gout.”

He set to work systematically on Spanish with a cultivated Spaniard who could speak no English, and with whom he read and talked every day, besides turning French and English literature into Spanish. “I am working now at Spanish,” he writes, 2 August, 1878, “as I used to work at Old French—that is, all the time and with all my might. I mean to know it better than they do themselves—which isn’t saying much. Considering how hard it has always been for me to speak a language—even one I knew pretty well—I am making good progress, for I did not begin till my return six weeks ago. Before that I hadn’t the spirit for it.” Of his tutor, Don Herminigildo Gines de los Rios, he adds: “He is a fine young fellow who lost a professor’s chair for his liberal principles, and is now professor in the Free University they are trying to found here. I like him very much.”

Three months later he wrote: “I am beginning to talk Spanish pretty well, but my previous knowledge of the language is a great hindrance. This may seem a paradox, but it isn’t. What I mean is that I know too much to catch it by ear. I understand all that is said to me, and accordingly cannot (without a conscious effort) pay attention to the forms of speech. They go in at one ear and out at the other. But I can write it now with considerable ease and correctness. I am to be admitted to the Academy this month, I believe.”

Lowell had been a year now at his post, and could venture to write of the internal politics of Spain with greater assurance because he had a more exact knowledge. His despatch to the government, No. 108, dated 26 August, 1878,[72] is a studied analysis of the character of the parties and leaders that composed the political situation. He begins by explaining his own reticence heretofore. “I have always been chary,” he writes, “of despatches concerning the domestic politics of Spain, because my experience has taught me that political prophets who make even an occasional hit, and that in their own country, where they may be presumed to know the character of the people, and the motives likely to influence them, are as rare as great discoverers in science. Such a conjunction of habitual observation with the faculty of instantaneous logic that suddenly precipitates the long accumulation of experience in crystals whose angles may be measured and their classification settled, can hardly be expected of an observer in a foreign country. Its history is no longer an altogether safe guide, for with the modern facility of intercommunication, influences from without continually grow more and more directly operative, and yet wherever, as in Spain, the people is almost wholly dumb, there are few means of judging how great the infiltration of new ideas may have been. Where there is no well-defined national consciousness with recognised organs of expression, there can be no public opinion, and therefore no way of divining what its attitude is likely to be under any given circumstances.”

In forming his judgment Lowell seems to have used the broad means which great ambassadors have always had recourse to. That is, he did not merely sift the opinions he received from Spaniards, or put himself under the tutelage of any one man, but he attended the debates of the Cortes, he read the more intelligent journals, he talked with leaders of Spanish opinion, and be availed himself of converse with those foreigners travelling in Spain, whose impressions could be valued, and behind all lay an old acquaintance with Spanish history and literature, constantly added to, and an apprehension of Spanish character, reënforced by personal intercourse. In a word, he went about the business of an American minister to Spain with the same painstaking care and the same breadth of view which, as a scholar, he would employ on the interpretation of a great piece of literature. He did not neglect the commercial side of his business, but he properly made it subordinate, holding that he was not merely representing the country as an eminent consul, but was assisting at the high court of international comity. In the analysis which he attempts, he testifies to the kind of training which he brings to the task, by fixing his attention mainly on the leaders of parties, and studying their characters and aims. Especially is this true of his acute examination of the qualities of Señor Cánovas del Castillo, whom he regards as not only the ablest politician, but capable also of being Spain’s most far-seeing statesman, and he makes his observation more effective by the comparison which he draws between him and Señor Castelar.

Mr. Adee, who, when Lowell went to Spain, was chargé d’affaires, in his intelligent and appreciative Introduction to “Impressions of Spain,” remarks that “necessarily lacking the knowledge of the true springs of national impulse deep down in the heart of the masses, he dealt with the surface indications, and analyzed the character and motives of the men on top, whose peculiarities most caught his attention.” It is quite as much to the point that Lowell did not assume a profound knowledge of the Spanish people, and that he wrote of the phenomena most on the field of his own activity as a minister resident. He was, moreover, too sound a scholar and too shrewd a man to indulge in philosophizing on a nation from the data furnished even by long study and some personal experience. Nevertheless, whatever he lets fall about Spain, as well as his more studied expression, indicates that kind of insight which was one of Lowell’s gifts of nature, and stood him in good stead as a critic of books, of men, and of nations.

It may militate against a respect for Lowell’s judgment in such matters, that after a score of years the vaticinations which he ventured to express in this despatch have not yet found a realization; yet twenty years is a short period in a nation’s life, and these opinions carry with them so much political faith, and are delivered with so much moderation, that they form interesting reading to-day, and may well be repeated here.

“My own conclusion,” he writes, “is that sooner or later (perhaps sooner than later) the final solution (of existing political problems) will be a conservative republic like that of France. Should the experiment there go on prosperously a few years longer, should the French Senate become sincerely republican at the coming elections, the effect here could not fail to be very great, perhaps decisive. In one respect, the Spanish people are better prepared for a Republic than might at first be supposed. I mean that republican habits in their intercourse with each other are and have long been universal. Every Spaniard is a caballero, and every Spaniard can rise from the ranks to position and power. This also is in part from the Mahometan occupation of Spain. Del rey ninguno abajo is an ancient Spanish proverb implying the equality of all below the King. Manners, as in France, are democratic, and the ancient nobility here as a class are even more shadowy than the dwellers in the Faubourg Saint Germain.

“In attacking Señor Cánovas the opposition papers dwell upon the censorship of the press, upon the reëstablishment of monachism under other names, and upon the onerous restrictions under which the free expression of thought is impossible. The ministerial organs reply to the first charge that more journals were undergoing suspension at one time during the liberal administration of Señor Sagasta than now, and this is true. The fact is that no party, and no party leader, in Spain, is capable of being penetrated with the truth, perhaps the greatest discovery of modern times, that freedom is good above all because it is safe. Señor Cánovas is doing only what any other Spaniard would do in his place, that is, endeavoring to suppress opinions which he believes to be mischievous. But of the impolitic extreme to which the principle is carried under his administration, though, I suspect, without his previous consent, the following fact may serve as an example. Señor Manuel Merelo, professor in the Instituto del Cardenal Cisneros, published in 1869 a compendium of Spanish history for the use of schools. In speaking of the Revolution of 1868, he wrote, ‘It is said that the light conduct (las léviandades) of Queen Isabel II. was one of the causes of this catastrophe.’ After an interval of nine years, he has been expelled from his chair and his book suppressed.

“If any change should take place, which I confess I do not expect, but which, in a country of personal government and pronunciamentos, is possible to-morrow, I think the new administration will find that with the best intentions in the world a country which has been misgoverned for three centuries is not to be reformed in a day. At the same time, I believe Spain to be making rapid advances toward the conviction that a reform is imperative, and can only be accomplished by the good-will and, above all, the good sense of the entire nation. There are strong prejudices and rooted traditions to be overcome, but with time and patience I believe that Spain will accomplish the establishment of free institutions under whatever form of government.”

In the course of Lowell’s incumbency, General Grant visited Spain on his journey round the world, and the embassy, of course, was busy in its attention to the great American. Lowell’s despatch to his government is a model of orderly, dignified statement of the incidents attending Grant’s visit, without the least of that free, personal note which characterizes so many of Lowell’s despatches. His letters home on the same event naturally are more gossipy, but they express well his admiration of Grant’s qualities.

In the spring of 1879 Lowell seems to have been in some uncertainty about his continued stay. There had been some talk of transferring him to Berlin, which he did not desire, but the President emphatically declared his wish that Lowell should remain at Madrid. He longed to be at home, yet since he had become adjusted to the place, he wished to secure the advantage and increase his acquaintance with Spain and the character of the Spanish. He was alert and ready now to make more confident notes regarding the people among whom he was living. In speaking of a friend who had been most kind to them, and who had a quartering of English race in her, he says:—

“She speaks both languages equally well, but is, I think, cleverer in Spanish, and gives it a softness of intonation which is almost unexampled here where the voices of the women are apt to be harsh and clattering like those of the Irish. Doesn’t Madame Daulnay say something of the kind? Nothing strikes me more than the rarity of agreeable voices, and (what I never noticed in any other country) one hears in the street the same tones as in the salon. I am for once inclined to admit an influence of climate. To jump from the physical to the moral, the Spaniards are the most provincial people conceivable, as much so as we were forty years ago. It is comfortable, for they think they have the best of everything—even of governments, for aught I know. But the everything must be Spanish. Even their actors they speak of in a way that would be extravagant even of Rachel, and I never saw worse. Perhaps the most oriental thing in this semi-oriental people is the hyperbole of praise which the critics allow themselves. It is quite beyond belief. The press, by the way, at least that of Madrid, is remarkably decorous, and never hints at private scandal. It may be because the duel is still a judicial ceremony—though hardly, for there is never any harm done. It may be that every one is conscious of a skylight in his own roof, through which a stone might come. On the whole, I think it is a relic of the old Spanish hidalguia, of which in certain ways I think there is a good deal left. But I don’t pretend to know the Spaniards yet—if ever I shall. When a man at sixty doesn’t yet know himself, he is apt to get startled and carried off by the readiness with which he hears shallow men pronounce judgment on a whole people. The only way to do this, I suppose, would be to read all history, to compare the action of different races or nations under similar circumstances (if circumstances ever are similar), and then, eliminating all points of likeness common to human nature, to analyze what was left, if anything should be left.”

Since it was determined that he should continue to be minister to Spain, Lowell proposed to use his yearly furlough by a hurried visit home in the summer of 1879, leaving Mrs. Lowell at Tours. “I wish Fanny could spend the summer with you in Maiche,” he writes to Mr. John W. Field who, with his wife, had been their companions for a while in Spain; “but we both think the other plan wiser, though not so agreeable. She will learn more French in Tours, and I think we can find a good family for her to go into through the French pasteur or the British chaplain, for there are both in the town. I hope to be in Paris by the 25th, and to find you still here. Delay for a day or two, I beseech you, for my sake. I can’t stay long, for I have to give a week to my friends in England on my way through. I can hardly contain myself at the thought of going home. It excites me more than I could have conceived—at my time of life! Were I as young as you it wouldn’t be surprising.”

This was written 15 June, 1879. On the 20th he wrote a line to the same friend to say that they could not start that day, as they had intended, and he could not say when they should, since Mrs. Lowell was not well enough to travel. “Nothing serious,” he adds, but as the days passed his tone changed. Serious indeed her illness proved to be. On the 9th of July he wrote: “Twice yesterday the doctors thought all was over. No motion of the heart could be detected—the hands and feet and nose became cold—and the dear face had all the look of death—the eyes altogether leaden and fixed. She had been without speech for twelve hours. What speech she had had for several days had been mere delirium. Suddenly at about six in the afternoon she revived as by a miracle, said she wished to be changed to another bed, was willing to take stimulants in order to strengthen her for it, and insisted that she could move herself from one bed to the other. This, of course, was out of the question. After being changed she was perfectly tranquil, though excessively weak. During the operation she spoke French to the Sœur who is nursing her, English to me, and Spanish to her maid, all coherently. Both doctors declared they had never seen such a case, or heard of it, and that according to all experience she ought to have died ten times over and days before. I have had two, one to relay the other, so that one could be at her bedside all the time. One has slept in the house—when he could sleep. The question now is of building up strength. It has been typhus of the most malignant kind. That has run its course. All danger is not yet over, but hope has good grounds. The chances are now in her favor, especially as she wishes to live. I will tell you more hereafter. God be praised!”

But the recovery was very slow, with many relapses and with periods of mental disorder. The original purpose was held to as long as it seemed possible, but at last, as summer passed into autumn and autumn into winter, it was plain that all plans of travel must be abandoned. Mr. Field made them a flying visit, then both Mr. and Mrs. Field came to Madrid to be with them and give them help and comfort. Their friends Señor and Señora de Riaño were most attentive, and Mr. Dwight Reed, Lowell’s secretary, had been almost indispensable. “I should have gone quite desperate without him,” Lowell writes; and again, 18 October: “Reed has been a great help. He comes every day to dinner and distracts me a little with rumors from the outer world. He is a thoroughly kind-hearted and affectionate fellow. But I can’t tell you what the loneliness of my night has sometimes been, when I have heard the clock strike every hour and every quarter till daylight came again to bring the certainty that she was no better.”