A week or two before this dinner the German elections had given the Conservatives an enormous victory. Germany, indeed, was in the full passion of economic and military development--all her people growing rich--intoxicated, besides, with vague dreams of coming power. Yet I have still before me the absent, indecipherable look of her Ambassador--a man clearly of high intelligence--at Mr. Lowell's table. Thirty years--and at the end of them America was to be at grips with Germany, sending armies across the Atlantic to fight in Europe. It would have been as impossible for any of us, on that May evening in Lowndes Square, even to imagine such a future, as it was for Macbeth to credit the absurdity that Birnam wood would ever come to Dunsinane! A year later Mr. Lowell came back to London for a time in a private capacity, and I got to know him better and to like him much.... Here is a characteristic touch in a note I find among the old letters: I am glad you found something to like in my book and much obliged to you for saying so. Nobody but Wordsworth ever got beyond need of sympathy, and he started there! CHAPTER III THE PUBLICATION OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_ It was in 1885, after the completion of the Amiel translation, that I began _Robert Elsmere_, drawing the opening scenes from that expedition to Long Sleddale in the spring of that year which I have already mentioned. The book took me three years, nearly, to write. Again and again I found myself dreaming that the end was near and publication only a month or two away, only to sink back on the dismal conviction that the second, or the first, or the third volume--or some portion of each--must be rewritten, if I was to satisfy myself at all. I actually wrote the last words of the last chapter in March, 1887, and came out afterward, from my tiny writing-room at the end of the drawing-room, shaken with tears, and wondering, as I sat alone on the floor, by the fire, in the front room, what life would be like, now that the book was done! But it was nearly a year after that before it came out, a year of incessant hard work, of endless rewriting, and much nervous exhaustion. For all the work was saddened and made difficult by the fact that my mother's long illness was nearing its end and that I was torn incessantly between the claim of the book and the desire to be with her whenever I could possibly be spared from my home and children. Whenever there was a temporary improvement in her state, I would go down to Borough alone to work feverishly at revision, only to be drawn back to her side before long by worse news. And all the time London life went on as usual, and the strain at times was great.