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