I have elsewhere alluded to his going to Europe to complete the preparations to enter into his professorship, and when he came back from this voyage he said to me, "I must study yet a good deal before I attempt to produce anything more." He finally felt the carelessness of form in his work, and in the succeeding years he worked very hard in his professorial work, which was, perhaps, not the best for his advancement as an author, but it certainly gave more solidity to the production of those years which intervened between his simpler life and his diplomatic career. His lectures before the students and the public (the popularity of Lowell as a lecturer was immense) solidified an education which, as he himself humorously avowed, was often broken by freaks of irrepressible youthful spirit; and the saddening and indelible effects of the war, which came between and sharply divided those phases of his career, had so modified his character for the graver and more profound that I agree with those of his friends who consider his entry into the diplomatic career as a misfortune for American letters, and that his mind flowed to waste in those later years. Nor was he at home in diplomacy. It was a reversal of all the conditions of his habitual existence; but it flattered his _amour propre_ that the country should recognize the part he had taken in the cultivation of the anti-slavery sentiment of the nation, and the trace of worldly feeling which I have noted grew under the stimulus to a motive in life. His social gifts were very great, and his patriotic pride intensified the pleasure of his successes in a line of life which was really secondary in his nature. In those years of his diplomatic life we saw little of each other. Our intimate intercourse was suspended by my going to Europe in 1859. We were nearest each other in our Adirondack life, in which he had all the zest of a boy. He was the soul of the merriment of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the liberty of the occasion, and the _genius loci_. One sees through all his nature-poetry the traces of the heredity of the early settler, the keen enjoyment of the fresh and unhackneyed in nature, even of the angularity of the New England farmhouse and the brightness and newness of the villages, so crude to the tastes founded in the picturesqueness of the Old World. Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to remember, and perhaps by none so keenly appreciated as by me, to whom the joy of forest life was a satisfactory motive for living. CHAPTER XV THE ADIRONDACK AND FLORIDA