Yet much at home as he was in Whitby, Lowell could not well resist the contagion which attacks all summer wanderers. As he wrote to Lady Lyttleton from Whitby, 7 September: “I am a bird of passage now, and that makes me feel unsettled wherever I am, but I have enjoyed my stay here, and the hogsheads of fresh air I have drunk have done me good.... I go down to Somersetshire on Saturday to Mr. Hobhouse, who has promised to show me Wells Cathedral, the only one in England I have not seen. Thence I go to the Stephens.” During this summer he was fitfully engaged in bringing together such poems as he had written since the volume “Under the Willows,” or had written before but had not included in that volume, and he continued his work upon it after his return to Deerfoot Farm in the fall. He pondered over what he should include, what leave out, and the medley which resulted caused him, in the volume “Heartsease and Rue,” to distribute the contents without regard to chronology under a variety of headings,--Friendship, Sentiment, Fancy, Humor and Satire, Epigrams. “My book will be a raft manned by the press-gang, I fear,” he wrote. “There will be some hitherto unprinted things in it--many of them trifles--some of which, however, please my fancy and may another’s here and there.” As he went on with the work of collection, he grew more and more distrustful. “I feel,” he wrote 22 December, 1887, “like a young author at his first venture. I think there will be some nice things in the book, but fear that _my_ kind of thing is a little old-fashioned. People want sensation rather than sense nowadays.” Again, 4 January, 1888, he writes: “I am wondering more and more if my poems are good for anything after all. They are old-fashioned in their simplicity and straightforwardness of style,--and everybody writes so plaguily well nowadays. I fear that I left off my diet of bee bread too long and have written too much prose. A poet shouldn’t be, nay, he can’t be anything else without loss to him as poet, however much he may gain as man.” Yet he liked the little task of collecting the volume, and there was a pleasurable content in his uneventful country life with his books and pipe. “My mind is busy,” he wrote, “and I like it. I am sitting in the sun without fire and I like that. My pipe tastes good and I like that too, for it enables me to treat with indifference some alarums and incursions of the gout which I was sharply aware of yesterday and this morning. No weather-sign is so truthful as this: If your pipe is savory, nothing is the matter with you. Put that in _your_ pipe and smoke it!”