His birthday in 1876 found him reflecting on the degree to which he was absconding from active life. “I get so absorbed,” he writes, “in the pretty shadows on the surface of Time, that I never notice the flowing of the current, and while I am musing, behold it has brought Next Year abreast of me.... I am going to dine with Gray, C. J., this afternoon to meet the Friday Club. I am invited to join it, and have been pondering over my answer these six weeks. I feel as if it might shake me up a little, for solitude is gradually making me numb. But I don’t know. I have the best possible Swift in my head, if I could only get him out. I have half written it twice, and am now going to begin again. You don’t believe me when I tell you that my mind is sluggish, but it is.” Apparently he had planned a paper on Swift of the proportions of one of his _North American_ articles; what actually appeared was a brief review of Forster’s “Life of Swift” in the _Nation_. He wrote but little verse, though he was not neglectful of the work of others. “By the way,” he wrote to Mr. Howells, 21 March, 1875, “who is Edgar Fawcett? Those ‘Immortelles’ of his in the last _Atlantic_ are in my judgment easily the best poetry in the number. I have been taken with things of his before, I remember. Why _did_ you let the other man (whose name I have forgotten) spoil a charming little poem by writing Ac’tæon? I doubt if Artemis would have wasted an arrow in him--but Pallas Athene would have given him the ferule. It was so light and pretty, all the rest of it.” In a nature like Lowell’s there is more the appearance of sluggishness than the reality. His industry is evident enough when one adds his published and uncollected writings to his regular academic duties. What may easily have provoked the popular notion of his indolence was the privacy of his life, the fact that he himself was little _en evidence_, and the casual on-looker seeing him sitting for hours over his books and pipe, taking his social recreation only in the seclusion of his own cherished home, and the libraries and dining-rooms of a very small circle of friends, hardly ever going even to Boston, and drawn when on his feet rather to Beaver Brook than to the pavements,--such an one might fancy him almost a scholarly recluse, living anywhere but in the American present. But a great deal of the bustle of other men’s lives had its sphere of activity in Lowell’s mind. He was wont to retreat within himself, but it was to reflect on what he saw in the world about him. As has been seen already, he had commented on public affairs in verse which was not to be credited to his poetic sense so much as to his moral and political insight, and the tide of feeling was rising in his soul. It needed occasion only to bring him more actively into the current of affairs.