Lowell had been longing for a holiday; Mrs. Lowell’s health, never robust, gave him now new cause of solicitude; the death of his mother severed one special cord that would tie him to his home, and thus, in the spring of 1851, it was decided to carry out a design formed more than once before, and spend a year at least in Europe. The Lowells tried to persuade the Gays to accompany them, but without success. “We are going,” Lowell wrote to Gay, “in a fine ship which will sail from Boston on the 1st July. She was built for a packet, has fine accommodations, and will land us at Genoa--a very fit spot for us New-Worlders to land at and make our first discovery of the Old. À Castilla y à Leon (To Yankees also be it known) Nuevo Mundo dió Colon: And so we Western men owe a Kind of debt to Genoa. Also people can live like princes (only more respectably) in Italy on fifteen hundred a year. We are going to travel on our own land. That is, we shall spend at the rate of about ten acres a year, selling our birthrights as we go along for messes of European pottage. Well, Raphael and the rest of them are worth it. My plan is to sit down in Florence (where, at least, the coral and bells and the gutta-percha dogs will be cheaper) till I have cut my eye (talian) teeth. _Tuscany_ must be a good place for that. Then I shall be able to travel about without being too monstrously cheated.” CHAPTER VII FIFTEEN MONTHS IN EUROPE 1851-1852 Mr. and Mrs. Lowell, their two children, a nurse, and a goat sailed from Boston, Saturday, 12 July, 1851, in the barque Sultana, Watson, master, which went to the Mediterranean and dropped the little party at Malta. “We had a very good run from land to land,” Lowell wrote his father a few days before reaching Malta, “making the light at Cape St. Vincent on the night of the seventeenth day out. I stayed upon deck until we could see the light,--the cape we did not see at all, nor any land till the next morning. Then we saw the coast of Spain very dim and blue,--only the outline of a mountain and some high land here and there. The day before we made land we had a tolerably good specimen of a gale of wind, enough at any rate to get up so much sea that we were in danger of having our lee quarter boat washed away, the keel of which hangs above the level of the poop deck. As it was we lost the covering of one of our port-holes, which was knocked out by the water which was swashing about on the lower deck.