He went on one or two short cruises and enjoyed the genuine country life with its salt flavor, but was back at Elmwood in the fall. The year had found some intimate expression in his verse, as well as the more objective poems like “Pictures from Appledore,” suggested in part it may be by one of his summer cruises, though the last section was written four years before. Mr. Stillman, who made his acquaintance at this time, when he was foraging for _The Crayon_, the new literary and art journal which his enthusiasm had projected, speaks warmly of the princely courtesy with which Lowell received him. “Out of the depth of the shadow over his life,” he writes,[100] “in the solitude of his study, with nothing but associations of his wrecked happiness permitted around him, the kindly sympathy with a new aspiration wakened him to a momentary gaiety, his humor flashed out irrepressible, and his large heart turned its warmest side to the new friend, who came only to make new calls on his benevolence; that is, to give him another opportunity to bestow himself on others.” On his part, Lowell welcomed heartily this ingenuous lover of art and letters. They took long walks together over the country Lowell knew so well, to Beaver Brook, the Waverley Oaks, and the Waltham hills. “You made me fifteen years younger,” he wrote, “while you stayed. When a man gets to my age, enthusiasms don’t often knock at the door of his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he but the breath of a resurrection-trumpet to stiffened old fellows, bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late?” The poems which register the tranquillity of a return to common life, like “The Windharp” and “Auf Wiedersehen,” are tremulous with the emotion which he could bear to express. Indeed, when Lowell came to print the former of these poems he omitted one stanza, possibly as going farther than he cared to with his contemporaneous public. In the letter last quoted, he sent it to Mr. Stillman. “O tress that so oft on my heart hath lain, Rocked to rest within rest by its thankful beating, Say, which is harder,--to bear the pain Of laughter and light, or to wait in vain, ’Neath the unleaved tree, the impossible meeting? If Death’s lips be icy, Life gives, iwis, Some kisses more clay-cold and darkening than his!” But as a comprehensive record of this whole experience, the “Ode to Happiness” written at this time may be taken as most conclusive. The very form of the ode, a form to which Lowell was wont to resort in the great passages of his life, aided the expression, for its gravity, its classic reserve, even its labored lines served best to hold that sustained mood which impelled the poet to stand as it were before an altar and make his sacrificial hymn. Tranquillity, he avers, is the elder sister of Happiness. “She is not that,” he says:--