more valuable part of his library came into the possession of the college either by his bequest[57] or by purchase, and the student having recourse to these books is constantly reminded of the care with which Lowell read them, pencil or pen in hand, going over the text as if it were proof-sheets requiring revision, and jotting down now textual criticism, now ingenious comparison with words and phrases in other languages. Sometimes he had two texts by him, and revised one by the other, sometimes his better knowledge or his mother wit enabled him to supply emendations to some careless editor’s work. The annotations show his keen philological interest. A word, whether in Old French, English, or Yankee was at once a lively image and an article in a museum. He never tired of pursuing the ancestry or the kin or the progeny of these winged creatures, and the very wealth of his puns testified to the quick association which his mind kept up with all the material of language.[58] So far as the interpretation of mediæval literature went, Lowell’s intuitive perception and quick poetic sympathy enabled him to touch into life what to many scholars was a mere cadaver to be dissected; but in the historical treatment, and more especially in the comparative method, he was at the disadvantage of entering upon the study before the great work had been done in this field. It was probably on this account that though he covered a good deal of ground in his lectures to his classes, he did not avail himself of this work for publication. Besides his academic work, Lowell took up also some writing, contributing verses during the next few months to the _Atlantic_ and the _Nation_ and making the last of his studies in great literature in an article on Spenser. A large part of the pleasure of these papers for him was the opportunity it gave him for a fresh reading of his author. “I have been very busy with Spenser,” he writes to Mrs. T. S. Perry, 28 February, 1875, “about whom I hope to have something in the next N. A. R. I have been reading him _through_ again. It is as good as lying on one’s back in the summer woods.” To another friend he had written just before: “I have had a bath of Spenser. Your Turkish are nothing to him.” It is an illustration of the thoroughness with which he revised his work that this article on Spenser started as a lecture, but when he came to turn the lecture into a paper, he retained only a passage or two of the original form.