After visiting the House of Lords with Mr. R. C. Winthrop, on one occasion, he was accosted by a laboring man in the street, who asked permission to speak with him, and recited a verse of "Excelsior," before which the poet promptly retreated. Passing to the continent, the party visited Switzerland, crossed by the St. Gothard Pass to Italy, and reached Cadenabbia, on the Lake of Como. They returned to Paris in the autumn; then went to Italy again, staying at Florence and Rome, where they saw the Abbé Liszt and obtained that charming sketch of him by Healy, in which the great musician is seen opening the inner door and bearing a candle in his hand. In the spring they visited Naples, Venice, and Innsbruck, returning then to England, where Longfellow received the degree of D. C. L. at Oxford; and they then visited Devonshire, Edinburgh, and the Scottish lakes. He again received numberless invitations in London, and wrote to Lowell, "It is only by dint of great resolution that I escaped a dozen public and semi-public dinners." At the very last moment before sailing, he received a note from Mr. E. J. Reed, the chief constructor to the British Navy, who pronounced his poem "The Building of the Ship" to be the finest poem on shipbuilding that ever was or ever would be written. He reached home September 1, 1869. In his letters during this period, one sees the serene head of a family, the absolutely unspoiled recipient of praise, but not now the eager and enthusiastic young pilgrim of romance. Yet he writes to his friend Ferguson that if he "said his say" about York Cathedral, his friends would think him sixteen instead of sixty; and again tells his publisher Fields that he enjoys Lugano--never before visited--to the utmost, but that "the old familiar place saddened" him.{91} Many a traveller has had in later life the same experience. {86 _Life_, iii. 111.} {87 _Life_, iii. 111, 112.} {88 _Ib._ 112.} {89 _Life_, iii. 114.} {90 _Ib._ 114, 115.} {91 _Life_, iii. 122.} CHAPTER XX DANTE We come now to that great task which Longfellow, after an early experiment, had dropped for years, and which he resumed after his wife's death, largely for the sake of an absorbing occupation. Eighteen years before, November 24, 1843, he had written to Ferdinand Freiligrath that he had translated sixteen cantos of Dante, and there seems no reason to suppose that he had done aught farther in that direction until this new crisis. After resuming the work, he translated for a time a canto as each day's task, and refers to this habit in his sonnet on the subject, where he says:-- "I enter here from day to day, And leave my burden at this minster gate." The work was not fully completed until 1866, and was published in part during the following year.