After a visit to St. Ives, Lowell returned to London and remained there till the middle of November. His friends the Misses Lawrence were at Wildbad. As he never quite finished his couplets to Mrs. Gilder, so he never quite exhausted the playful names he gave these two ladies. “O Giminy,” he wrote from London, 1 October “(for I have exhausted all other ways of expressing your twinship in my affection, and any opening exclamation will suit the context), O Giminy, I say, how can you be happy in a hotel that Klumpps with a double p like a man with a club foot, and in a town which, by its own confession, is both wild and bad? What are you doing there? Taking the baths? You can’t soak the goodness out of you, if you try never so hard, that’s one comfort. You ‘admired the traces of the Romans at Treves’ did you? Pray, did you see the Holy Coat? _That_ is what the place is famous for, bless your innocent souls. And then your single room at Munich with ‘2 or 3 Bismarcks, as many Gladstones and Döllingers’ in it. Do you expect me to believe _that_? It would have been uninhabitable had there been only one apiece of them, and you know it. You trifle with my understanding. Smoky London, indeed! The sky to-day is like a gigantic blue bell tipped over to pour out the sunshine it cannot contain. And the town is emptily delightful and one does not see a soul one knows from one end of the week to t’other. I shouldn’t mind its being fuller by a dozen or so, my Ambidue among them. Indeed, I was thinking yesterday of writing to ask where you were and when you were coming back to the lovers who (all but one of them) make me so jealous. The middle of October seems a great way off to that single inoffensive one, but ’tis better than nothing. I shall be here till the middle of November, and you will let me know the moment you come, won’t you? “I haven’t the least notion where Wildbad is, and you give no geographical details, so I don’t feel sure that this will ever reach the Hôtel Klumpppppp though there can’t be two of that name even in this most patient of worlds. Did Wagner ever set it to music? Methinks ’twould have suited his emphatic and somewhat halting genius. But I shall try for a guide-book, and if this never reaches you, I shall be consoled with thinking that you will never know how little you have lost.