Elmwood was let, and if it had been vacant Lowell could hardly have gone back there at once to live. There were too many ghosts in the house, he said. He made no attempt to take up again his college work, though he held his title of Smith Professor with _emeritus_ added, and as his daughter had abandoned her plan of taking her children abroad, he made his home with her at Deerfoot Farm, Southborough, Massachusetts, about two hours by rail from Boston, in a pretty country where there was little intrusion of manufactures. He always had also a home in Boston at the house of his sister, Mrs. Putnam. He was at once besieged with invitations from many friends; as he wrote to Mr. Gilder: “I have been all these days in the condition of a bird of Paradise, unable to perch, no matter I might wish it, and perhaps embarrassed by the number of friendly roosts offered to my choice--yours not the least seductive among them.” He made up his mind to attend the Commencement at Harvard, though he dreaded both the heat and the emotion,--as he wrote: “O for a good freezing English July day!” He found himself deluged with letters--it was almost as bad as in London. Many he was unable to answer, many answered themselves after Napoleon’s easy-going philosophy, but with the return to private life and in the absence of any routine duties, Lowell took up again with a careless prodigality the occupation of letter-writing. He had left friends in England who had endeared themselves to him, and whose letters to him readily drew a response, and to his old friends he was always faithful, so that, taking Mr. Norton’s two volumes as a gauge, we find that he wrote twice as many friendly letters in the five years after his return to America as in the five years just preceding. “I am already,” he writes to Mr. Norton, 22 July, 1885, “in love with Southborough, which is a charmingly unadulterated New England village, and with as lovely landscapes as I ever saw.... ’Tis an odd shift in the peep-hole of my panorama from London to this Chartreuse. For the present I like it and find it wholesome. I fancy myself happy sometimes--I am not sure--but then I never was for long;” and to Mrs. Clifford he wrote, 2 August: “I am planting my cabbages diligently and growing as much like them as I can. One must have confidants of one kind or another, and where one is cut off from women, one must follow Wordsworth’s advice and seek an intimacy with nature in whose impartial eyes cabbages are as interesting as--I was going to say strawberry-leaves, but remembered that you were an Englishwoman. I _wasn’t_ going to say women, though logically I ought. Perhaps they are as safe. I am trying to make myself tolerable to five grandchildren, though I am not so sure that I have enough of the Grandfather in me to go round among so many.”