To see your handwriting again was almost like taking you by the hand. I seem next door to you here, the distance is so short compared with the long ferry between me and Mabel. I had no thought of reproaching you with not answering my note from Venice. I only wished you to know that I had written, for I should not have done it if Field had not told me you wished to know where I was. I never write if I can help it, and therefore am ready not only to forgive, but even to sympathize with those who have the same failing. If I could get in at Mrs. Bennett’s again I should like it particularly, for I was perfectly satisfied there. She was not a bit the lodging-house landlady of tradition, but a really refined woman, and her household matched her. But I fear that paradise is closed against us, for when I was last in London somebody else had discovered her, and hired the whole house. If you would be good enough to ask and let me know I should be greatly obliged.... I should want the lodgings for a fortnight. The steamer’s day is put back to the 23d. On the whole I shall go back as young as I came except my eyes, which fail me more and more.... _To the Same._ BRUNSWICK HOTEL, LONDON, Thursday. MY VERY DEAR FRIEND,--I was hoping to see your manly and tender face once more before I go, but perhaps it is better as it is, for I hate farewells--they always seem to ignore another world by the stress they lay on the chances of never meeting again in this. We shall meet somewhere, for we love one another. Your friendship has added a great sweetness to my life, whether I look backward or forward.... I had a delightful visit to Cambridge. Everybody was as warm as the day was cold. When I go home I shall try to be half as good as the public orator said I was.... Good-by and God bless you. With most hearty love, Yours always, J. R. LOWELL. The reference in the last sentence is to the generous language in which the degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon him by the University of Cambridge. He regarded the decoration as in a measure a friendly recognition of the University’s daughter in the American Cambridge, but he could not help being pleased by it. “You don’t know,” he wrote to a friend, of the public orator’s Latin speech, “what an odd kind of _posthumous_ feeling it gives one.” The Lowells sailed from Liverpool 23 June, 1874, and after a foggy and rainy passage were ten miles from Boston Light Friday evening, 3 July. There the fog caught them again and forced them to lie off till the morning, so that they reached Cambridge at half after nine o’clock on the Fourth of July. CHAPTER XIII POLITICS 1874-1877