When, in the spring of 1845, the Lowells returned to Cambridge from Philadelphia, where they had spent the first four months of their married life, it was to share the family home of Elmwood for the next six years. Lowell’s father retired in the summer of 1845 from active charge of the West Parish in Boston, but retained his interest in various societies which gave him partial occupation, leaving him leisure for the indulgence of his taste for reading and for the pleasures of gardening and small farming. His mother, whose malady slowly but steadily increased, was under watchful care. She was taken to various health resorts in hopes of recovery, and spent a part of her last years under more constant treatment at an asylum for the mentally deranged. Miss Rebecca Lowell had charge of the little household, and now and then went on journeys with her father or mother or both, leaving the young couple to themselves. As one child after another came into the circle, the grandfather found a solace for the sorrow which lay heavily upon him, and his letters, when he was on one of his journeys, were filled with affectionate messages for his new daughter and her children, mingled with careful charges to his son concerning the well-being of the cattle, small and large, and the proper harvesting of the little crops. Mrs. Lowell’s family lived near by in Watertown, and one by one her sisters married, one of them coming to Cambridge to live. The society of the college town was open, and it was in these early years that Lowell formed one of a whist club, which, with but slight variation in membership, continued its meetings to the end of his life, and the simple records of which were kept by Lowell. Its most constant members were Mr. John Holmes, a younger brother of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mr. John Bartlett, who was for a while a bookseller in Cambridge, and afterward until his retirement a member of the publishing firm of Little, Brown & Co. of Boston, and best known by his handbook of “Familiar Quotations” and his elaborate “Concordance to Shakespeare,” and finally Dr. Estes Howe, who married Mrs. Lowell’s sister. Lowell was much given to concealing in his verse or prose little allusions which might be passed over by readers unaware of what lay beneath, but would be taken as a whispered aside by his friends. Thus in a “Preliminary Note to the Second Edition” of “A Fable for Critics,” he says: “I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half comic sorrow, to think that they all[81] will be lying to-morrow tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all but their half dozen selves.”