The year that passed after the return from Europe saw Mrs. Lowell declining in strength, though it was not till September, 1853, that his letters betray Lowell’s deepening anxiety, and it was not till the end of the month that he fully realized the progress disease had made. Mrs. Lowell died 27 October, and Lowell was left alone with his little daughter. The visionary faculty, which all his life had been what might almost be called another sense, came now to his help and for awhile he lived as if the companion of thirteen years, though shut out from his daily sight, visited him in the solitude and silence of the night. “I have the most beautiful dreams,” he writes, “and never as if any change had come to us. Once I saw her sitting with Walter on her knee, and she said to me, ‘See what a fine strong boy he is grown.’ And one night as I was lying awake and straining my eyes through the gloom, and the palpable darkness was surging and gathering and dispersing as it will, I suddenly saw far, far off a crescent of angels standing and shining silently. But oh! it is a million times better to have had her and lost her, than to have had and kept any other woman I ever saw.” It had given both husband and wife a great pleasure to see one and another of Mrs. Lowell’s poems printed during the last year in _Putnam’s Monthly_. Mr. Briggs, with his affectionate regard for both, was eager to print the verses as they were sent him, and reported all the agreeable words that came to him respecting the poems. The latest to be printed was one on Avignon, in which the poet kept turning back from the historic and spectacular sights to some oleanders which stood by her window. “How beautiful it was,” Lowell wrote to Briggs, “and how fitting for the last. I am going to print them all--but not publish them yet--she did not wish it. I shall give a copy, with a calotype from a drawing which Cheney is to make from Page’s picture, to all her friends.”