If she come, I may stay, whatever Cleveland thinks best.” To Mr. Field he wrote, 11 December, 1884: “We are well and waiting to hear our fate. I should be indifferent but for a few friendships here. All England is writing to express regret. But I am old enough to think that they will survive the loss of me.... Fanny is better than at any time since she left Spain, and quite willing to stay here now that the chances are against it. But she _will_ not believe that anybody would recall me! She doesn’t know the depths of human depravity.” So wonted had Lowell become to his English surroundings that some of his friends in England laid plans to keep him with them, and sounded him as to his willingness to be nominated for the professorship of English language and literature which had lately been established in Oxford. “Had he consented to stand,” says an editorial article in the _London Times_,[91] “not even a Board determined to sink Literature in Philology could have passed over his claims. But he declined for two reasons. There were claims of family over in Massachusetts; and, greatly as he loved the mental atmosphere of England, he thought it his duty not to accept a definitely English post. And the sense of duty is strong in that old Puritan stock from which he sprang.” But there came an event which made all speculation regarding his plans vain and illusory. On [Illustration: _Mrs. Frances Dunlap Lowell_] the 19th of February, 1885, Mrs. Lowell died after a short, sharp illness. The loss struck a chill in his heart which made him dumb for the most part, but he wrote to his friends, Mr. and Mrs. John W. Field, who had been sharers in his profound anxiety during those painful days in Madrid:-- LONDON, 6 March, 1885. DEAR OLD FRIENDS,--What shall I say to you, even though I have the sad comfort of feeling that whatever I say will be said to those who loved her and knew the entire beauty of her character. But I must at least say how deeply grateful I am to you whose friendly devotion in Madrid did so much to prolong a life so precious. She was given back to us for five years, and for the last two of them was hopeful enough about her health to enjoy her life. She had grown easy in her ceremonial duties, and (since the death of her mother and sisters) had no desire to return home. It is all bitterly sad. It seems there was no hope from the first,--though I naturally thought it an attack like that of three years ago which she would pull through. The doctors all believed as I did. But they think now that there was some organic and incurable lesion of the brain,--perhaps a tumor,--and that this disturbance was the cause of her fever in Spain instead of being its consequence.