[101] Chickering Hall, New York, 28 November, 1887. [102] In one of the verses of this poem Lowell had used the picturesque phrase:-- “Let the bull-fronted surges glide Caressingly along thy side, Like glad hounds leaping by the huntsman’s knees.” In answer to a criticism from a friend, he wrote: “There is no mixed metaphor. I don’t compare the waves to bulls, but merely say they are bull-fronted,--and so they are, with the foam curling over between their horns as in the bulls which I have often interviewed in the pastures here--with a stout stone wall between us _viersteht sich_. That I afterward say they leap like hounds implies no confusion of images. My dog Vixen has a bull-front, if ever there was one, and is always leaping about my knees, as my trousers can testify.---- saw the waves and heard ’em butt against the prow. Ask her. I always see what I describe while I am thinking of it. I see the waves now, as if I were in mid ocean on board the good barque Sultana in ’51.” To the same friend he wrote a month later: “I am glad you found something in the Téméraire for all that,--or try to be glad. But when I saw it in print, it saddened me.” [103] Dr. Mitchell likewise received an honorary degree in medicine from the University of Bologna on this occasion. [104] In a note to me at the same time he wrote: “I begin to examine my cards curiously, expecting to find that of Old Age overlooked in some corner.” [105] _The Westminster Gazette_, 21 August, 1893. [106] The poem was by Mr. Bliss Carman. [107] “Small-Beer Chronicle,” in _Roundabout Papers_. [108] An examination made after Lowell’s death showed that the bleeding with which the sickness began eighteen months or more previously was the first step in the course of the growth of a cancer of the kidney. The disease had extended to the liver, and at the last to the lungs. [109] See an interesting note by W. J. Stillman in the _Spectator_, 1 July, 1899. [110] For these details I am indebted to statements made by Mrs. Mary Lowell Putnam and to _The Historic Genealogy of the Lowells of America from 1639 to 1899_. Compiled and edited by Delmar R. Lowell. [111] As Mrs. Lowell’s paternal ancestry went back but two generations on this side of the Atlantic, it has been thought well to trace her grandmother’s descent from Robert Cutt [the name later becoming Cutts], who was in the same generation with John Lowell, the son of the first Perceval Lowell. I am indebted for most of this material to _Genealogy of the Cutts family in America_, compiled by Cecil Hampden Cutts Howard. Albany: Joel Munsell’s Sons. 1892. [112] Abbreviated afterward in this record as “Standard.” End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2, by Horace Elisha Scudder