Lowell dedicated his second series of “Biglow Papers” to Judge Hoar. “A very fit thing,” he writes, “it seems to me, for of all my friends he is the most genuine Yankee.” In the same letter he writes with eagerness of a new poetic enterprise he had undertaken, or rather of an old one revived.[27] “I have been working hard, and if my liver will let me alone, as it does now, am likely to go on all winter. And on _what_ do you suppose? I have taken up one of the unfinished tales of the ‘Nooning,’ and it grew to a poem of near seven hundred lines! It is mainly descriptive. First, a sketch of the narrator, then his ‘prelude,’ then his ‘tale.’ I describe an old inn and its landlord, barroom, etc. It is very homely, but right from nature. I have lent it to Child and hope he will like it, for if he doesn’t I shall feel discouraged. It was very interesting to take up a thread dropt so long ago, and curious as a phenomenon of memory to find how continuous it had remained in my mind, and how I could go on as if I had let it fall only yesterday.” This was “Fitz Adam’s Story,” which Mr. Child found no difficulty in liking, so that Lowell sent it at once to Mr. Fields for the _Atlantic_, where it appeared in January, 1867. “I mean to work ahead as fast as I can with the rest,” he wrote to Mr. Fields, and in the spirit which then possessed him he had high hopes of completing “The Nooning,” having already, as we have seen, various parts of it ready for final articulation. He wrote Mr. Fields again, 8 November, 1867, when urged to send more of the poem: “I cannot get into the mood of my Nooning story just now,” but evidently he hoped still to go on with it, for he did not include “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his next collection of poems published in 1869; yet when twenty years more had gone by, and “The Nooning” was still in fragments, he saw that there was no likelihood of his ever producing the rounded whole, and so included “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his latest collection with an apologetic note.
“I am already beginning to feel the relief from those confounded recitations,” he wrote a month or so after the fall term at college began, “both in better health and better spirits.” He sent Mr. Fields not only this poem for the _Atlantic_, but a fairy tale and a poem for _Our Young Folks_. “You asked me once,” he writes, “for a fairy story, and I suppose never expected to hear of it again. But it is not safe to cast bread on _my_ waters. I invented a kind of one at once, and yesterday and the day before contrived to write it, partly to spite an infernal pain I was suffering, and which got me under at last. I think I have told it simply enough, and was surprised to find how easy it was to write in words mostly of one syllable. I think there are some pleasant humors in it, but it may have suffered from my being in such a wretched condition while I wrote it. Please read it yourself, and show it to no one. To tell the honest truth, I have never read _Our Young Folks_, and so do not know whether it is suitable or not. Perhaps I could write it over again, but that might spoil it, for I might not be able to fancy myself so vividly telling it again as I did before.