Excerpt from The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell

His Was indeed a nature sloping to the southern side, and his friends could bask in the even sunshine of it, while he kept the gloomy skies carefully to himself. After months of constant pain, and anxiety for his daughter's health which he sums up in half a' dozen lines, he writes in October 1890 I am beginning to feel like my old, or rather my young self again. When you write next it must be in words of one syllable, and with everything adapted to the apprehension of a boy. I have had enough to do with death, nor wish to have more till my own turn comes, and that I am ready for, tho' perhaps too easily contented here. But the earth is so beautiful And six months later, in his last letter, after a terrible relapse Yester day I left my bed where I had been lying for a fortnight, and am now hobbling about in felt slippers. I suffered such bitter torture that I foresee. I shall recover slowly. This being so, I must give up the feeble hope I had of seeing the dear old Home this summer. I am glad you got the books and like them. I didn't mean by this collected and uniform edition to write finis, ' tho' I am not sure my health won't write it for me. But I have enough uncollected essays of one kind or another to make a volume, and poems enough to fill a small other volume. If the summer does as much for me as I hope, I suppose that I shall wet my pen again. Good news this for readers, and for friends, even in their present distress. Then he breaks away into politics with all his old playfulness. You mustn't think the Irish question settled, or near it. You know how highly I value Balfour, but the Irish trouble is something too deep for railways or transplantation to cure. It is a case of suppressed gout. Experto erede! - Don't I live in the midst of a population chiefly Irish? It is proof against everything - even against the exquisite comicality of its own proceedings. Boulogne must be in the Grand Duchy of Gerolstein. You are having daffodils and things ere this. We are still in the depths of winter if that is to be measured by snow. The view from my windows would gladden the heart of a polar bear. But this will make our spring less unendurable when it comes. Our politics are going well. The Congress just ended has spent all our surplus and more. This brings us down to hard-pan at last, which will be good for us.

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