From Paris Lowell ran over to London, chiefly to see the Storys, who were there, and renewed his acquaintance with Thackeray and the Brownings, and fell in with Leigh Hunt. But his main business was to make himself proficient in German, and so having taken his academic vacation in advance, he journeyed through the Low Countries, and settled himself in Dresden for the autumn and winter. The quiet Saxon city was a favorite resort for Americans then even more than now, and for the first few weeks his sister, Mrs. Putnam, was there with her family. It was with a dull, heavy feeling that he gave himself to his tasks, seeing very little of society. “I confess frankly,” he wrote, shortly after his establishment there, “that I am good for nothing, and have been for some time, and that there are times almost every day when I wish to die, be out of the world once for all.... I fear I shall come back with my eremitical tendencies more developed than ever.” But dogged persistence in work was something better than an anodyne, and work hard he did. “A man of my age,” he wrote to his father, “has to study very hard in acquiring a new language, and I cannot be satisfied without knowing thoroughly all I undertake to know. I am very well and constantly busy.” Mr. Norton with his sisters crossed the Atlantic in the autumn, and Lowell wrote to him at Paris: “Did I tell you that I had a room on the ground floor, with a glass door giving upon a large garden? that I have a flock of sparrows that come to breakfast with me every morning, and eat loaf sugar to the detriment of my coffee? That I go to hear lectures on the Natural Sciences and have even assisted at the anatomical class,--beginning with horror and ending with interest? That we have the best theatre here I ever saw? And by the way, if Bouffé acts the _Abbé Galant_ while you are in Paris, go and see it by all means. It is a truly artistic piece of representation. If it be not too cold, go down to Chartres. It is simply the best thing in France, and must have come out of some fine old Norman brain,--I am sure no Frenchman could ever have conceived it. After all, there are no such poets as the elements. Leave a thing to them, and they redress all imperfections and expunge all prose.”