After some delays attendant on such business, Lowell was able in the summer of 1871 to make a sale of a portion of the original estate of Elmwood which left him the house and a couple of acres for his home, and an income of four or five thousand dollars a year. It was a modest living, but it cleared his mind of fretting cares. As he wrote to Mr. Stephen: “It is a life-preserver that will keep my head above water, and the swimming I will do for myself.” Of the effect upon his mind he wrote more freely to his friend Mr. Norton: “I cannot tell you how this sense of my regained paradise of Independence enlivens me. It is something I have not felt for years--hardly since I have been a professor. The constant sense of a ball and chain jangling at my heels, and that those who are inexpressibly dear to me were at the risk of my giving satisfaction in an office where what is best in me was too often held in abeyance by an uneasy self-consciousness forced upon me by my position, have been greater hindrances than anybody else can ever know. But now I can draw a full breath of natural air and discarbonate my lungs of the heavy atmosphere of an unnatural confinement. I look forward to my next year’s work with cheerfulness. I am no longer chained to the oar, but a volunteer. Whether I shall recover the wholesome mental unrest which kept me active when I was younger, I know not, but at least I shan’t have to print before I am ready, nor to keep on with the spendthrift habit of splitting up the furniture of my brain to keep the pot boiling.... I mean to come abroad at the end of the next college year, and shall pop in on you some day, bringing a familiar odor, half Cambridge, half pipe. I shall read you my new poem--when it gets written--and bore you with old French in which I am still plunged to the ears. I am become a pretty thorough master of it, and wish I knew the modern lingo half as well.”