Lowell’s visit to Philadelphia and Washington is pleasantly reflected in his letters. His son-in-law, Mr. Burnett, was at that time a member of the House of Representatives, and Lowell, though he expressed a fear lest his lion’s mane should blow off, was entertained agreeably and came away with an admiration for many of the public men he met. His seventieth birthday came shortly after his return to Boston, when he was given a dinner at the Tavern Club over which Mr. Norton presided. “I was listening to my own praises for two hours last night,” he wrote to Mrs. Fields, “and have hardly got used to the discovery of how great a man I am.” He heard these praises again in a more public way when the _Critic_ of New York made its number for 23 February a “Lowell birthday number,” having collected warm tributes of affection and admiration from seventy men and women of note in America and England. By an ingenious alphabetical arrangement the editor displayed his letters from Y to A, the astronomer Young heading the list and the poet Aldrich closing it. The English names naturally were fewer in number, but they included Tennyson and his son, Gladstone, Lord Coleridge, Lang, Locker-Lampson, and Palgrave; amongst his own countrymen were those yet his seniors, Holmes, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, the elder Furness, and President Barnard, while the poet Parsons born in the same year and a host of juniors joined in the chorus of loving praise. As Dr. Horace Howard Furness truly said: “It is no small tribute, in itself, to Mr. Lowell that we should all be thus ready to praise him to his face.” Lowell had set the date for his annual pilgrimage to England at 27 April, but a pressing invitation to speak on the 30th of that month at the great celebration in New York of the hundredth anniversary of Washington’s inauguration as first president, which he tried in vain to decline, compelled him to postpone his departure for nearly a month. Meanwhile he worked somewhat fitfully at literature, belabored as he was with letters and social distractions. Mr. Aldrich asked him to write for the _Atlantic_ a paper on John Bright, who had just died. At first he thought he could write it, but a fortnight later he wrote: “There is no use in trying. Cold molasses is swift as a weaver’s shuttle compared with my wits. I have essayed every side of the subject like a beetle in a tumbler and find myself on my back after each attempt. So you must let me give it up.” It was characteristic of his unfailing interest in all genuine literature, new or old, that he should at the same time have written to Mr. Aldrich his pleasure in a poem, “Deaths in April,” in the current _Atlantic_. “Too intricate and even obscure I thought it here and there, but perhaps the intricacy is of forest-boughs and the obscurity nothing more than the gloom which they teach light to counterfeit. Never mind, ’tis the Muses’ utterance.”[106]