certain that my next appearance will not be in a pamphlet on the Hungarian question in answer to the _North American Review_. But I shall not write anything if I can help it. I am tired of controversy, and, though I have cut out the oars with which to row up my friend Bowen, yet I have enough to do, and, besides, am not so well as usual, being troubled in my head as I was summer before last. I should like to play for a year, and after I have written and printed the ‘Nooning’ I mean to _take_ a nooning and lie under the trees looking at the skies.” The Hungarian movement interested both Lowell and his sister, Mrs. Putnam, deeply. Lowell had printed in the _Standard_ his verses to Kossuth, and Mrs. Putnam had written vigorously in the _Christian Examiner_. Robert Carter also printed a series of papers on the subject in the _Boston Atlas_, which were reprinted in a pamphlet. Lowell did not write the pamphlet he meditated, but a year later he wrote seven columns in the _Boston Daily Advertiser_, in defence of his sister against Professor Bowen’s attack. “It was the severest job I ever undertook,” he wrote Gay. “I believe I was longer at work in actual hours than in writing all Hosea Biglow and the ‘Fable for Critics.’” He had displayed his interest previously by a stirring appeal for funds in aid of the Hungarian exiles.[87] And now came three events to the little household at Elmwood that wrought a change in the life of Lowell and his wife. The first was the death of their third child, Rose, 2 February, 1850, after a half-year’s life only. The loss brought vividly to remembrance the experience which had entered so deeply into their lives when the first-born, Blanche, was taken away. “For Rose,” Lowell writes to Gay, “I would have no funeral; my father only made a prayer, and then I walked up alone to Mount Auburn and saw her body laid by her sister’s. She was a very lovely child--we think the loveliest of our three. She was more like Blanche than Mabel, and her disease was the same. Her illness lasted a week, but I never had any hope, so that she died to me the first day the doctor came. She was very beautiful--fair, with large dark gray eyes and fine features. Her smile was especially charming, and she was full of smiles till her sickness began. Dear little child! she had never spoken, only smiled.” Again death came that way, and on 30 March, 1850, Lowell’s mother died. The cloud which had for years hung over her had deepened, and her death was looked upon as a release, for whether at home or in seclusion she was alike separated from her family. As Lowell wrote:-- “We can touch thee, still we are no nearer; Gather round thee, still thou art alone; The wide chasm of reason is between us; Thou confutest kindness with a moan; We can speak to thee, and thou canst answer, Like two prisoners through a wall of stone.”[88]