But his highest ambition in life was to publish a worthy translation of Goethe and Schiller, together with a biography of both. This had been his purpose from the time he first visited Weimar and Gotha. To this his other labors became gradually subordinated. How he came to turn his attention to prose fiction can be accounted for on the supposition that he adopted that character for the purpose of testing his own powers, and securing an income which would enable him to prosecute his studies and investigations relating to Goethe and Schiller. He did not hope to be a leading novelist, and the public placed a much higher estimate on his novels than he did. The desire he had to immortalize his old home, the urgent appeals of friends, and the advice of acquaintances, pressed him into a field which he confessed in his lectures was uncongenial. Yet he had no more reason to be ashamed of “Hannah Thurston,” “John Godfrey’s Fortunes,” and the “Story of Kennett,” brought out soon after his return from Russia, than he had thirteen or fourteen years before to be ashamed of the Jenny Lind prize-song, or the poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College. After leaving Russia, he soon returned to the United States, and, with lecturing and writing, occupied the time until again called abroad by a desire to see some localities visited by Goethe, and describe the great Paris Exhibition of 1867. Then followed those years of work at home, and travel abroad and at home, as his duties as author, editor, and correspondent demanded. In 1866 appeared his poem, “Picture of St. John,” which was immediately translated into Italian by an admirer in Florence. His poem, “The Ballad of Abraham Lincoln,” appeared in 1869, “Goethe’s Faust,” in 1871, “The Masque of the Gods,” in 1872, “Lars, a Pastoral of Norway,” in 1873, “The Prophet, a Tragedy,” in 1874, and “Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics,” in 1875.