the reading world would have had very much more from him had he never been subject to this demand. It is even quite possible that the work kept him very much more alive than he might otherwise have been, saving him from a species of intellectual luxury of an unproductive sort; it is certain that the hours added thus to his other productive time were a stimulus and inspiration to many men, and that as a practical matter the work done for his classes in the way of direct preparation was the foundation of a good deal of his published criticism. And yet it is not so certain that his mood for poetry was helped by his academic life. He wrote to Mr. Stillman 14 May, 1857: “While my lectures are on my mind I am not myself, and I seem to see all the poetry drying out of me. I droop on my rocks and hear the surge of the living waters, but they will not reach me till some extraordinary springtide, and maybe not then.” It is true, this expression must not be pressed too hardly--it may have been only the mood of the moment; but it is evident that the time of freedom in poetic composition had largely passed for him; it returned once and again, as for instance in “Agassiz” and the “Commemoration Ode,” it was compelled for him by the occasion which drew out the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” but for the most part his poetry after this date bears rather more the touch of deliberation and less the abandon of his early enthusiasm. How far this is to be referred to the circumstance of the constraint of academic work, and how far to the change which came over his life in the passage from ebullient youth to chastened manhood one would not care to say. But the period of his next twenty years was the period of prose in his production. The regular, punctual life which the daily college exercise demands came as a steadying influence after the vagrancy and informality of the previous years, and now there was added the gracious and helpful presence of a self-contained, sympathetic, congenial woman. Mrs. Lowell, before her death, had wished her daughter to be under the oversight of an intimate friend, Miss Elizabeth Dunlap, but before the arrangements could be completed, Miss Dunlap died, and her sister Frances took the place and had had charge of Mabel Lowell ever since her father had left America for his year of study in Germany. He had thought himself most fortunate in making the arrangement, and the friendly intercourse which naturally sprang from this relation ripened steadily into affection. In September, 1857, they were married, and now he was enabled to resume the old life at Elmwood.