ugh 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 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