“It takes a good while,” he writes to Miss Norton, “to slough off the effect of seventeen years of pedagogy. I am grown learned (after a fashion) and dull. The lead has entered into my soul. But I have great faith in putting the sea between me and the stocks I have been sitting in so long.” He worked steadily at his college duties, with some thought, I suspect, of finishing with his professorial work, the laboriously learned part of his life. The minute, painstaking care to which he gave to the studies which underlay his college work, so evident in the annotation of his books, was after all a severe drain upon a nature that took the greatest delight in imaginative freedom. He seems hardly to have allowed himself any relief. “I have been reading over your book[46] again,” he writes to Mr. Fields, 29 February, 1872, “and found it very interesting and queer. Queer, I say, because it is the first volume I have read for some months later than the XIV. century, and I was a little puzzled at first, like Selkirk when he got back among his own people and heard his own language again. I am glad you have left out the imaginary nephew. One was apt to stumble over him and apologize with a ‘Beg pardon, but really had forgotten you were here.’ These buffers between the reader and the first personal pronoun never lessen the shock, though they are always in the way. But nobody wants them, for egotism does not consist in never so many capital _I’s_. Moreover, I am persuaded that everybody likes it in his secret heart (as he does garlic), and says he doesn’t for appearances. “Your Dickens letters are a great deal more interesting than Forster’s for some reason or other. I fancy it is because they are more natural. In writing to Forster, Dickens must have felt that he was writing to his biographer, and had the constraint of sitting before a glass. Indeed, I was very much disappointed in Forster’s volume.[47] It doesn’t leave an agreeable impression, which is surely a fault in biography. “What a dear old affectionate soul Miss Mitford was! I knew nothing about her before. Even her little vanities are rather pleasant than otherwise. It is surely a delightful gift to be made happy as easily as she. “We are all busy getting ready for Mabel’s departure. I hate to think of it, though I believe she is as safe as human forethought could make her. Burnett is all I could wish.” Miss Lowell was married 2 April, 1872, to Mr. Edward Burnett, and went with him to Southboro, Massachusetts, where he was carrying on a dairy and stock farm. Miss Rebecca Lowell died in May, so that the household at Elmwood was in a measure dissolved. Lowell was busy up to the last over the long article on Dante which he contributed to the July _North American_. He was released from his college work, having resigned his professorship; he let Elmwood to Mr. Aldrich and sailed 9 July for Europe with Mrs. Lowell, to be absent two years. CHAPTER XII THIRD JOURNEY IN EUROPE 1872-1874