The winter of 1851–52 Lowell spent with his family in Italy, and the following spring and summer in journeyings through France, England, Scotland, and Wales. In October he sailed for home, having as ship companions Thackeray and Arthur Hugh Clough. Just a year later Mrs. Lowell died (October 27, 1853). For months afterward Lowell was in ‘great agony of mind, and he had to force himself into those laborious hours which one instinctively feels contain a wise restorative.’[65] He abounded in literary plans, some of which (and among them a novel) were never carried out, whereas others, his papers in ‘Putnam’s Magazine’ and his lectures on English Poetry, before the Lowell Institute, were in a high degree successful. Each lecture of the Institute course had to be given twice, so great was the demand for tickets. Lowell was very nervous over his first platform experience, and not a little pleased when he found that he could hold the audience an hour and a quarter (‘they are in the habit of going out at the end of the hour’). The singular merit of the lectures led to his being appointed to the chair of belles-lettres at Harvard, just resigned by Longfellow. After a year’s study abroad the new professor entered on his academic duties (September, 1856). In 1857 Lowell married Miss Frances Dunlap, of Portland, Maine. She was a woman of reserved though gracious manners and rare beauty, who through her serene temper and fine critical sagacity, together with a keen sense of the humorous, exerted a most beneficent influence on Lowell’s life. The burdens of college work were not so heavy as to prevent Lowell’s assuming the editorship of ‘The Atlantic Monthly,’ a new literary magazine with an anti-slavery bias. He held this post from 1857 to 1861, and proved to be one of the best of editors, though routine was irksome to him, and the vagaries of contributors called for more patience than he could at all times command. Two years after leaving the ‘Atlantic’ he undertook to edit the ‘North American Review’ in company with Charles Eliot Norton, on whom fell the chief responsibilities. Lowell, for his part, contributed to the ‘Review’ many notable papers on politics and literature. The Civil War called out much of Lowell’s most spirited prose and not a little of his best poetry. A second series of _Biglow Papers_ appeared in the ‘Atlantic,’ and for the commemoration of sons of Harvard who had fought for the Union, Lowell wrote his magnificent _Commemoration Ode_. This noble performance was literally an improvisation, written in a single night.