When Lowell returned to America he went back to Elmwood. Mrs. Burnett had arranged to return with her children and make a home there for her father, and it was with a long sigh of content that he settled himself in a place which was endeared to him by lifelong attachment. Yet it was with some discomposure that he looked upon the changes going on in the neighborhood. The village of Cambridge had long ago become a city, though still retaining a lingering village air, but now houses were creeping toward the confines of the town and filling those great empty spaces which had given him the sense of delightful roominess. He was a genuine conservative as regards places, and no doubt his English residence had confirmed his conviction that it was well to strike root deeply in planting the family, which is the greatest conservative force. A few years before, when he was minister to England, I brought him news of the neighborhood, and his brow clouded as I reported the rumor that more horse-car tracks were to be laid near Elmwood. “I never, never will go back there to live,” he declared vehemently, “if they make these inroads on my place.” He had been forced to reduce the area of the estate as it was in his father’s day and his youth, but he was jealous of any further encroachment on the integrity of his little patch of land, and in a world of change about him clung tenaciously to his foot-hold. * * * * * During the winter of 1889-1890 Lowell occupied himself with preparing a uniform edition of his writings, and answered one or two of the applications he had for poems or papers. His own needs were few, he lived simply, and he was under no stress of necessity, but he was eager to turn over with increment the little estate he had to his daughter and her children. Mr. Howells had interested himself in procuring a poem from Lowell for _Harper’s Monthly_, for which a liberal sum was paid, and Lowell, when the transaction was over, wrote him: “I happened to want the money, and though one cannot write a poem for money, one is glad to get what one can for it once written. You partly know how it is with me. My heart’s desire is to leave Mabel as independent as I can, and what I leave will, at best, hardly go round among so many. Now I had got myself into a place where I could not keep certain promises I had made without encroaching on my principal. Your benefice will just tide me over. The sacredness of my little pile has become almost a cult with me.” [Illustration: _The Hall at Elmwood_]