The Lowells returned at once to Elmwood, which the Aldrich family had relinquished on the first of July, and were welcomed by Mrs. Burnett and the first grandson, who had come down from Southborough to greet them. “He is as strong and good-natured as a young mastiff,” Lowell wrote a week after his return, to Mr. Hughes. “I am already stupidly in love with him and miss all day long the tramp tramp of his sturdy feet along the entry.” “Thus far,” he writes to Mr. Godkin, 16 July, 1874, “I have nothing to complain of at home but the heat, which takes hold like a bulldog after that toothless summer of England, where they have on the whole the best climate this side of Dante’s terrestrial paradise. The air there always seems native to my lungs. As for my grandson, he is a noble fellow and does me great credit. Such is human nature that I find myself skipping the intermediate generation (which certainly in some obscure way contributed to his begetting, as I am ready to admit when modestly argued) and looking upon him as the authentic result of my own loins. I am going to Southborough to-day on a visit to him, for I miss him woundily. If you wish to taste the real _bouquet_ of life, I advise you to procure yourself a grandson, whether by adoption or theft. The cases of child-stealing one reads of in the newspapers now and then may all, I am satisfied, be traced to this natural and healthy instinct. A grandson is one of the necessities of middle life, and may be innocently purloined (or taken by right of eminent domain) on the _tabula in naufragio_ principle. Get one, and the _Nation_ will no longer offend anybody. You will feel at peace with all the world.” The summer was spent happily in the old familiar home. Lowell had no impulse to stir. He never could find any reason for escaping to the resorts in the White Mountains. “Why the deuce people fly to the mountains before the Last Day,” he wrote to Mr. Aldrich, “I can’t conceive, but when you get over your insanity and come back to the breezy plains again (thermometer 70° at half-past eight this morning), I shall hope to see you. My catbird saved one sonata for the first day of my home-coming and has been dumb ever since.” Lowell fell to work at once in his study, giving laborious days to Old French and Old English and feeling a confidence which he expressed naïvely by saying that he used a pen instead of a pencil in his notes in his books. When the college term opened in the fall, he renewed his connection, walking up and down to his class-room and resuming his teaching of Dante and Old French. After his death the [Illustration: _Mr. Lowell in his Study_]