To all this must surely be added, that his very abstinence from political party associations at home deepened Lowell’s sense of his position. His conception of the nation which he represented was not embarrassed by the vapors too often engendered by “practical politics.” He knew his country, as we have already seen by an examination of his political writings, and even when most full of concern for her integrity, he always kept before him the ideal of a land devoted to freedom and progress. That he was an idealist made him more readily an actor on the diplomatic stage where America met Spain when Lowell conversed with Silvela. But his idealism did not get in the way of his plain business sense. Rather it helped him and supplied that consciousness of dignity which might have forsaken him had he regarded himself merely as a business agent. The drawback to his satisfaction with the office was his consciousness that he disliked business and was not apt at it; and business after all was what lay constantly beneath all the courtly exchange of civility. “You would have laughed,” he wrote to an intimate friend, “if you could have seen my anxiety when I had to give a receipt for an indemnity of five hundred thousand dollars. I was so afraid of making a blunder. It kept me awake night after night, even when I had signed it, and gave me such palpitations of the heart that I have had pains there ever since. It was not myself I was thinking of--but the guild--I didn’t wish another of those ‘d--d littery fellers’ to come to grief.” And to Mr. Putnam he wrote: “I like the Spaniards very well so far as I know them, and have an instinctive sympathy with their want of aptitude for business.” Of course he relied much on the subordinate officers of the legation, but he knew well that he could not leave the business to them, and he had, besides, for a while the interest in the details of a life which was novel to him, as well as the pride which would not suffer him to be a mere figure-head. * * * * * The Lowells were about a month on their way from Boston to Madrid. They spent a few days in London, and Lowell was in a holiday mood both there and in Paris, where they also made a brief halt in the same pleasant inn in the Latin Quarter in which they had been so much at home three years before. The tranquil enjoyment of little scenes which his letters from the two capitals disclose betokens a mind unvexed by many cares. He was entering upon a new and untried experience, but he was too old to feel an undue excitement, and too well poised to borrow trouble from ignorance of superficial duties. He was rid of the rather irksome and too familiar occupations of the academic life, he was yet in his freedom to assume novel responsibilities, and he set his face toward Madrid with an equanimity which was no doubt heightened by the feeling that he was not Professor Lowell on a vacation, but Minister Lowell about to realize his new function.