“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.
When Lowell went to Europe in the summer of 1872, he left his college routine behind him; with his new-found liberty, he seemed to find all the expression he cared for in familiar talk with the many friends, old and new, whom he encountered in his travels, and in letters to friends at home and abroad. Once only, as will be seen, did he break into poetry, but the two years of his absence contain so little to add to the record of his production that it seems the natural course, as it is most pleasant to the biographer, to let this holiday in Lowell’s life be told for the most part in his letters. The letters printed by Mr. Norton[48] are not drawn upon, except now and then for a needful phrase.
ROYAL VICTORIA HOTEL, KILLARNEY, 20 July, 1872.
MY DEAR HUGHES,--Finding I could land in Queenstown, I did so with most infinite discomfort, and here I am in Ireland, having on my way hither done Blarney Castle which is well-nigh as good as Kenilworth. Here, to my surprise, I find a gigantic new R. C. Cathedral, See of the Bishop of Kerry. However, I am not writing a guide-book. I wish to ask if you are in London, and how long you will remain. I am of two minds,--one to go straight to the Continent, the other to stay a week or two in London in lodgings and see things quietly in that blessed season when everybody is out of town. You I “lot” upon seeing. Will you write me at the Grosvenor Hotel, Chester (where I shall turn up by and by), and let me know? I am not even sure if Parliament have adjourned. Think of it! Just like our Yankee impudence, isn’t it? But the truth is, the last paper I saw was dated 9th July, and I hate to make acquaintance again with the World and its goings-on.