A few weeks after the return of the Lowells to America, Longfellow took Clough on a walk to Elmwood. “Lowell,” he says, “we found musing before his fire in his study. His wife came in, slender and pale as a lily.” In reading “A Year’s Life” one is struck by the frequency with which the shadow of death falls across the page. It is true that when he wrote the poems, when indeed he fell in with Maria White, Lowell was struggling out of an atmosphere which was full of damp mist, and the image of death naturally rose constantly before him. Yet it remains that from the beginning of his passion he associated this love with the idea of death. So frail, so almost ethereal was the woman who came thus into his life, that from the first he was constantly sheltering her from the cold blast. The solicitude deepened his passion; it accustomed him at the same time to the idea of transitoriness in the life he led. It is entirely possible, nay, very probable, that this spiritually-bodied girl was permitted to develop into a gracious womanhood through the very fact of her marriage and her motherhood: Lowell’s own mood during the nine years of married life was, as we have seen, often irrepressibly gay and sanguine, and after the death of each of their children the two seemed to spring back into a wholesome delight in life. Still, the fear could never have long been out of their minds, and, after Walter died in Rome, the mother seems steadily to have drooped. When Lowell sent “The Nest” to Underwood, he speaks of it as an old poem: “Perhaps,” he says, “it seems better to me than it deserves, for an intense meaning has been added to it.” The meaning had then indeed been deepened, but when it was written, there was more than remote prophecy in the lines-- “When springs of life that gleamed and gushed Run chilled, and slower, and are hushed.”