Brunswick Hotel, London,
Thursday.
My very dear Friend,—I was hoping to see your manly and tender face once more before I go, but perhaps it is better as it is, for I hate farewells—they always seem to ignore another world by the stress they lay on the chances of never meeting again in this. We shall meet somewhere, for we love one another. Your friendship has added a great sweetness to my life, whether I look backward or forward....
I had a delightful visit to Cambridge. Everybody was as warm as the day was cold. When I go home I shall try to be half as good as the public orator said I was.... Good-by and God bless you. With most hearty love,
Yours always,
J. R. Lowell.
The reference in the last sentence is to the generous language in which the degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon him by the University of Cambridge. He regarded the decoration as in a measure a friendly recognition of the University’s daughter in the American Cambridge, but he could not help being pleased by it. “You don’t know,” he wrote to a friend, of the public orator’s Latin speech, “what an odd kind of posthumous feeling it gives one.”
The Lowells sailed from Liverpool 23 June, 1874, and after a foggy and rainy passage were ten miles from Boston Light Friday evening, 3 July. There the fog caught them again and forced them to lie off till the morning, so that they reached Cambridge at half after nine o’clock on the Fourth of July.
CHAPTER XIII
POLITICS
1874-1877
The Lowells returned at once to Elmwood, which the Aldrich family had relinquished on the first of July, and were welcomed by Mrs. Burnett and the first grandson, who had come down from Southborough to greet them. “He is as strong and good-natured as a young mastiff,” Lowell wrote a week after his return, to Mr. Hughes. “I am already stupidly in love with him and miss all day long the tramp tramp of his sturdy feet along the entry.”
“Thus far,” he writes to Mr. Godkin, 16 July, 1874, “I have nothing to complain of at home but the heat, which takes hold like a bulldog after that toothless summer of England, where they have on the whole the best climate this side of Dante’s terrestrial paradise. The air there always seems native to my lungs. As for my grandson, he is a noble fellow and does me great credit. Such is human nature that I find myself skipping the intermediate generation (which certainly in some obscure way contributed to his begetting, as I am ready to admit when modestly argued) and looking upon him as the authentic result of my own loins. I am going to Southborough to-day on a visit to him, for I miss him woundily. If you wish to taste the real bouquet of life, I advise you to procure yourself a grandson, whether by adoption or theft. The cases of child-stealing one reads of in the newspapers now and then may all, I am satisfied, be traced to this natural and healthy instinct. A grandson is one of the necessities of middle life, and may be innocently purloined (or taken by right of eminent domain) on the tabula in naufragio principle. Get one, and the Nation will no longer offend anybody. You will feel at peace with all the world.”