This Dr. Primrose, as his son once affectionately called him, had for a companion one who was the farthest possibly removed from the fussy, ambitious wife of the Vicar of Wakefield. When he once made a journey to Europe with Mrs. Lowell and their eldest daughter, the little party took especial delight in a trip to the Orkney Islands, and in the enjoyment of friendly intercourse with the Traills from that region; for it was but a step that Mrs. Lowell needed to take to bring her into close kinship with the Orkney folk. Her grandfather, Robert Traill, whose name, together with her own name of Spence, she gave to one of her boys, had come from Orkney to America, had married there, and left a daughter, Mrs. Lowell’s mother,[4] when he went back to Great Britain at the revolt of the colonies. Thus, when Robert Traill’s granddaughter visited Orkney, she was returning to her own kin. Not only so, but her father, Keith Spence, came of Highland ancestry, and it was easy to find a forbear in the Sir Patrick Spens of the old ballad, as it was also to claim kinship with Minna Troil, whom the Wizard of the North had lifted out of the shadowy forms of life into the enduring reality of “The Pirate.” This close affiliation with the North disclosed itself in Mrs. Lowell in a rare beauty of person and temperament, together with a suggestion of that occult power which haunts the people of the Orkney Isles. Whether or no Mrs. Lowell had, as was sometimes said, the faculty of second sight, she certainly had that love of ballads and delight in singing and reciting them which imparts a wild flower fragrance to the mind;[5] and her romantic nature may easily be reckoned as the brooding place of fancies which lived again in the poetic genius of her son. She had been bred in the Episcopal Church, and that may possibly have had its influence in the determination of her son Robert’s vocation, but in marrying Dr. Lowell she must have found much common ground with one who always resolutely refused to be identified with a sect almost local in its bounds. “I have adopted,” he wrote in 1855, “no other religious creed than the Bible, and no other name than Christian as denoting my religious faith.” The few letters from Mrs. Lowell’s pen which remain contain messages of endearment that flutter about the head of her “Babie Jammie,” as she called him, and betray a tremulous nature, anxious with pride and fond perplexity.