There was, perhaps, something in the adjustment of Lowell to his surroundings which set the springs of poetry flowing intermittently. At any rate, he was content, conscious that he was of service in a high position, happy both in his own health--“I have never seen a climate that suited me so well,” he wrote--and in his wife’s improvement, and surrounded by congenial companions. These things do not necessarily make for poetry, but Lowell had by this time come into that mellow stage when what he did had about it an absence of apparent effort, when his ripe experience and equipoise of life found easy expression, and poetry was a solace and a pastime. To be sure, there is something to make one smile behind his hand when one sees the American minister sending his “Phœbe” across the Atlantic and following it with almost daily corrections, yet one listens to the note with the feeling that the poet is putting into the reminiscence of a far-off sound not a little of his present apprehension of himself. Nay, the poem in its first form broke at last into two stanzas, wisely omitted in the final recension, which are almost bald in their apologetic confession:-- “Let who has felt compute the strain Of struggle with abuses strong, The doubtful course, the helpless pain Of seeing best intents go wrong. “We who look on with critic eyes Exempt from action’s crucial test, Human ourselves, at least are wise In honoring one who did his best.” On New Year’s Day, 1882, Lowell sent another poem, “Estrangement,” to Mr. Gilder for the _Century_. “I am pleased,” he wrote, “that you liked the little poem I sent you, and the more that you asked for another. Here is one you are welcome to, if you like it. I rather do, but that is nothing, and I shall like you none the less if you don’t. Treat me like a gentleman and not like a poet,--I mean as you would a gentleman and not a poet. I am tough and have myself played Herod to many an infant muse, and mine is approaching her second childhood.” His social life drew from him occasional verses, as when he planted a tree at Inverary, or thanked Miss Dorothy Tennant, who afterward married Henry M. Stanley, for a drawing of little street Arabs, or sent a sonnet home in honor of Whittier’s seventy-fifth birthday, or gave a posset cup to a god-child. He was happy in pleasing young friends with verses, sometimes inserting them in books which he gave them, or writing them in their albums.