He wrote the nine numbers of the series not only in the dialect of the countryside but from the viewpoint of a forthright, hard-headed, Puritan-tinged Yankee; and he put them out as the compositions of Hosea Biglow under the encouragement of Parson Wilbur, without the use of his own name. He was surprised by the cordial reception of the volume, fifteen hundred copies of which were sold in the first week. If he had put on the cap and bells to play fool to the public, he said, it was less to make the people laugh than to win a hearing for certain serious things which he had deeply at heart. "The Biglow Papers" were undoubtedly Lowell's great popular success. They carried the fight into the enemies' camp in the abolition struggle, they were resumed with new success with the outbreak of the Civil War, and they widened the reading public for his more sober political prose and for his more elevated verse. However, Lowell was not satisfied to be only a fighter. In a letter of January, 1850, he wrote to a friend: My poems hitherto have been a true record of my life, and I mean that they shall continue to be.... I begin to feel that I must enter on a new year of my apprenticeship. My poems thus far have had a regular and natural sequence. First, Love and the mere happiness of existence beginning to be conscious of itself, then Freedom--both being the sides which Beauty presented to me--and now I am going to try more _wholly_ after Beauty herself.... I have preached sermons enow, and now I am going to come down out of the pulpit and _go about among my parish_.... I find that Reform cannot take up the whole of me, and I am quite sure that eyes were given us to look about us with sometimes, and not to be always looking forward.... I am tired of controversy. Out of such a mood as this came the natural decision to make his first and long-deferred trip to Europe, a sojourn of fifteen months in 1851-1852 with his wife and children. His wide reading of foreign literatures gave the keys to an understanding of the peoples among whom he traveled, and especially to an understanding of Roman culture. His comments from Rome furnish an interesting contrast with Emerson's ("Written at Rome," 1833). The reaction of the Concord philosopher had been wholly personal. Lowell's was wholly national. Surely the American (and I feel myself more intensely American every day) is last of all at home among ruins--but he is at home in Rome.... Our art, our literature, are, as theirs, in some sort exotics; but our genius for politics, for law, and, above all, for colonization, our instinct for aggrandizement and for trade, are all Roman. I believe we are laying the basis of a more enduring power and prosperity, and that we shall not pass away until we have stamped ourselves upon the whole western hemisphere.