His itinerary, to be a little more detailed, was to Venice, then by rail to Verona, and to Mantua. There he hired a vettura to take him to Parma, and in the same mode he went to Bologna, sleeping at Modena on the way. From Bologna he went to Ravenna and thence to Florence. He went to Siena by the slow, roundabout rail, and then was driven to Orvieto by Chiusi. At Orvieto he was greeted by Mr. Norton, Mr. Page, and Mr. John W. Field, who had come out to meet him and to escort him to Rome. On his return from Genoa he made a stop at Nuremberg. He lingered in Dresden a few weeks, made another brief stay in Paris, and was once more in Cambridge, in August, 1856. * * * * * On his return from Europe Lowell did not resume life at Elmwood, but took up his quarters with his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe, on [Illustration: _House of Dr. Estes Howe_] Kirkland Street, in Cambridge. Longfellow was in his summer home at Nahant, and Lowell ran down to see him, looking, as the elder poet notes in his diary, “as if he had not been gone a week.” He took renewed delight in his country walks, and tingled afresh at contact with nature. “How I do love the earth!” he writes to Mr. Norton, who was still in Europe. “I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it, and I get rid of that duty-feeling,--‘What right have I to be?’--and not a goldenrod of them all soaks in the sunshine or feels the blue currents of the air eddy about him more thoughtlessly than I.” The college year opened a few weeks after his return, and he began his duties by repeating the course of lectures which he had delivered before the Lowell Institute the winter of 1855, before taking up his more specific work in German literature and Dante. It was in the teaching of Dante that Lowell made the strongest impression on the students who gathered about him, if we may judge by the reminiscences which more than one has printed; and the methods he adopted in his teaching never greatly varied, for he came to the work of teaching without any specific training, when he had been nearly twenty years out of college, and when the kind of interest in literature, which in his college days had disputed for supremacy with the docile habit of the schoolboy, had now become confirmed by study, by travel, and by his own productions. In an address which he gave in 1889 before the Modern Language Association of America, he recorded his judgment on the vexed question of the distribution of emphasis upon the philological and the æsthetic pursuit of the study of literature. It was twelve years since he had discontinued the practice of teaching, and it is reasonable to infer that he was distilling in a few sentences the experience which his method of study and his method of teaching recalled to him.