Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 1854-1860 1. Dresden and Harvard. The last months of 1853 and the first of 1854 were passed by Lowell in sad retirement. His father and his sister were with him, but since the paralytic stroke which Dr. Lowell had suffered in 1852, his mind had been partially broken and his mood morbidly excitable. Rebecca Lowell, too, was " queer," as the phrase is, and save for his sunny-hearted daughter there was little in the air of home to aid Lowell in his struggle back to the broad way of life. For a time his own consciousness was unwhole- somely complex, and he writes in his letters of the " ugly fancy" which he used to have in those days, that on coming back from his walks he should find some other James Russell Lowell sitting in his chair, surrounded by the familiar books and belongings which he had mistakenly believed to be his own. There were, however, many influences at work to draw Lowell back tohis old hopes and occupations. His repute as a poet was constantly spreading. Briggs had just written of him that he was " a greater poet than Tennyson," and there were not wanting many to agree with this view. But more potent than this was the favor which certain prose articles in a new vein found with a large circle of readers. These were " A Moosehead Journal," published in " Putnam's Magazine" for November, 1853; " Fireside Travels," in " Putnam's Magazine " for April and May, 1854; and " Leaves from my Italian Journal," in " Graham's Magazine " for April, May, and July, 1854. The variety of these prose sketches, their abounding life and felicity of phrase, marked Lowell's second conspicuous achievement in prose; in the opinion of the present writer the letters of Parson Wilbur had been first. It was fortunate for Lowell that he should succe...