In the spring of 1890 Lowell suffered from what he called the “first severe illness of my life.” It proved indeed to be the beginning of the end. For six weeks he kept his bed, and when he was able at last to crawl about, his physician forbade even the briefest journey. He had been asked to give an address in Vermont, and he was obliged to write: “I am not yet allowed even to drive out or to use my legs except in loitering about my own grounds. So you see that Castleton is as impossible to me as Mecca.... Let me add that I have a special partiality for Vermont as the New England State which maintains most persistently our best traditions.” To Mr. Godkin he wrote, 29 April: “I have had rather a hard time of it, and for a day or two Wyman had fears. The acute symptoms ceased a month ago, and I am now doing well, but my malady has somewhat demoralized me and I must consent to be an invalid for a good while yet. ’Tis my first experience and I don’t like it. Moralists tell us that pain is for our good, but even the gout has failed to make me think so, and this was even harder to bear.” But he had been amusing himself with some verses on “infant industries” which he sent in this letter, giving them the title, “The New Septimius Felton.” They were printed in the _Nation_ with the title, “The Infant Prodigy.” On the second of May he wrote from Elmwood to Mr. Gilder, who was to give the poem that year before Φ. Β. Κ. in Cambridge: “You may be sure that I shall support you with my sympathetic presence at Φ. Β. Κ. if my legs will by that time support me, as I have now every reason to think they will. I made an excursion to Cambridge (by horse-car) yesterday, my first adventure of the kind for fourteen weeks, and am none the worse for it.” Of course a summer in England was out of the question, and Mr. Leslie Stephen, one of the friends who made so large a part of an English summer to Lowell, came instead to America to see Lowell once more in his home. There he found him amongst his books and with the squirrels gambolling outside, but the days of long walks were over, and even the social pleasures which Lowell could share with his guest were few and simple.