“I never was good for much as a professor,” he wrote to Mr. Norton, 2 February, 1874; “once a week, perhaps, at the best, when I could manage to get into some conceit of myself, and so could put a little of my _go_ into the boys. The rest of the time my desk was as good as I. And then, on the other hand, my being a professor wasn’t good for me--it damped my gunpowder, as it were, and my mind, when it took fire at all (which wasn’t often), drawled off in an unwilling fuse instead of leaping to meet the first spark.” There was, besides all this, a possible complication with a friend in whose light he would not stand, and letting this tip the scales, he wrote refusing the reappointment. There came in reply a letter from the president of the college, removing the supposed complication and setting the whole matter in such a light that Lowell revoked his decision and accepted the appointment. It was characteristic of him, that though asked to send his final answer before a certain date, he dismissed the subject from his mind, and wrote from Paris three months later: “I don’t know whether I am a professor or no. On the second of May it suddenly flashed across me that I was to say _yes_ or _no_ before the first of that whimsical month, and that I had forgotten all about it. I meant to say _yes_ on the whole, but if luck has settled it _no_, perhaps it’s for the best.” A more consuming interest had driven professorships out of his head. He was in Florence at the time of this correspondence, and in Florence, too, when he heard of the death of Agassiz, and on the eve of leaving for Rome he was moved to write that elegy which, if it does not reach the height of his odes in poetical spirit, has that endearing quality which will continue to make it read as long as people continue to take delight in the verses in which poets celebrate their friendships. But Goldsmith’s “Retaliation,” Longfellow’s Introduction to the “Tales of a Wayside Inn,” Emerson’s “Adirondacs,” and Holmes’s occasional poems are in lighter vein than “Agassiz,” which stands midway in poetry between such poems and Milton’s “Lycidas.” As in the case of the others, it has a succession of portraits, but it strikes a deeper note; the elegiac quality is present, and the complaint, the linking of personal grief with universal emotion, the widening of sympathy, all serve to leave in the mind rather the mood of restless enquiry into deep problems of life, than of sensitive appreciation of a series of portraits. It is perhaps worth noting that he had just been reading Leslie Stephen’s “Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking,” and had been stirred by the book into more or less of an enquiry of his own attitude toward the great questions of life and immortality. Referring to the book, he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I emancipated myself long ago, and any friendly attempt to knock off my shackles is apt to result in barking my shins, don’t you