At this time he began confidentially to whisper to friends at home that he doubted if he could stand it much more than a year; but from the middle of April, 1877, he took a two months’ leave of absence and with Mrs. Lowell made an agreeable journey which brought him back in better content to his life in Madrid. They travelled first from Madrid to Tarbes, thence to Toulouse, Carcassonne, Nismes, Avignon, and Arles. From France they went to Genoa, to Pisa and to Naples, whence they took steamer to Athens, where they stayed a week or so. Lowell’s official position not only drew upon him a little official ceremony, but it tinctured his reflections also, leading him to observe and note matters which might have some bearing upon international questions or might affect in a way his own special function as minister to Spain. “I have just come back from the Palace,” he writes to Mr. Norton from Athens, 31 May, 1878, “where I was presented to the King, a fine young Dane, good-looking and intelligent, and with whom I cannot help feeling a great deal of sympathy just now. For never was man or kingdom in a more difficult position. Greece was quite willing to make a snatch at the chestnuts in the fire, even at the risk of burning her own fingers, and they wouldn’t let her. I have seen decayed gentlemen who lived very comfortably on the former glories of their family, and drove about in an imaginary coach of their grandfathers’--but with Greece, if one can’t say exactly _noblesse oblige_, it at least makes her uneasy, and the laurels of Miltiades are a wakeful bed. She has an immense claim, and no resources to make it good--not even the documents that prove clear descent. It is curious, but I have not seen a face of the type that statues and medals have taught us to consider Greek. In a regiment that marched by yesterday at least seven eighths of the men, perhaps nine tenths, had the nose of the dying gladiator, which I take it is Slavonic. Yet continuity of language is certainly something, and I am so stupid that I can’t get over my astonishment at seeing the street-signs, and hearing the newspapers cried in Greek.” A sudden opportunity to go to Constantinople shortened the stay in Athens, and Lowell had a glimpse of the Orient. “My Eastern peep,” he wrote after his return to Madrid, “has been of service in enabling me to see how Oriental Spain still is in many ways. Without the comparison I couldn’t be sure of it.”