Lowell went again to England in the spring of 1888, and in June to Bologna, where he was a delegate from Harvard on the occasion of the celebration of the eight hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the University. He received from Bologna the degree of Doctor of Letters. He left London for the continent on Saturday the 9th of June and was back in a week. He had a most uncomfortable experience, being attacked severely by the enemy which now seemed to be always lying in wait for him. He gave an outline of his discomfiture in a letter written to Mr. Norton three weeks after his return to London.
“My gout began in Bologna. It announced itself on Tuesday by an illness which prevented me from venturing out, and so a very pretty speech in Italian which I had in my head remained there to the great loss of mankind. Doctor Weir Mitchell[103] came to me at once on hearing of my disorder, so that I was able to be out next day to receive my degree with the rest. As I walked home from the ceremony I found myself very lame and foreboded what was coming to pass. I got off with Story to Milan by the train leaving Bologna at 1 A.M. I spent Thursday in Milan, where I provided myself with felt slippers, and next day started for London to escape being ill in an Italian inn. I got through the thirty-one hours’ journey fairly well with the help of the Glasgow delegates Ramsay and Ferguson, who helped me in every way. I don’t think my journey did me any harm. By the time I reached Calais on Saturday I was able to get on my boot again and thought I had got over the worst, but next day I had to resign myself to my sofa, and for ten days was in intense pain. The whole foot in every joint and the ankle were inflamed. For three days the other foot (in the toe joint only) took sides with its mate, and I was discouraged. This, however, passed off, and last Thursday [5 July] I was able to be dressed. To-day I have my boots on, though stropeato. Ecce tutte.”
He was in Whitby again in August, living as he liked so well now to do with his books and letters and few friends and the walks which were little more than easy strolls. He wrote to his friend Mrs. Leslie Stephen who was at St. Ives in Cornwall: “I am still pretty lame (do you know I begin to think that I am really seventy at last, and not playing that I am) and can take only short walks. But I hope that the air here will gradually blow the years out of me again. And the fish diet, too, a far more invigorating animal here than in your sleepy Southern waters which have done nothing but sun themselves and doze since Sir Cloudesley Shovel’s days. What are your pilchards when you contrive to catch ’em, and your gurnards (of which latter indeed nothing is left but a petrified head fit only for the table of a geologist that ever I heard of) to our cod and whiting and ling, to speak of no others, with their flesh hardened by constant struggle with our cold Northern waters? Why, your poor fellows have to come all the way hither to catch even a herring, while we have them fresh from the sea every morning. I wish I could send you a few as we know them. And where is your Abbey? We are under the special protection of B. V. Sanctæ Hildæ with the added flavor in our prayers that she was a king’s daughter and therefore of our set, and with that sympathy for our special infirmities that comes of knowledge. If you have any saint ’tis some fellow with a name you can’t pronounce, and who understands nothing but Cornish, whereas Hilda spoke English, as Freeman has proved over and over again.”
To Mr. Norton, who had been advising with him on some points in the translation of Dante, he wrote from Whitby: “You put me some pretty stiff conundrums, but I will try.... The swoon at the end of the canto (Inferno III.) is a nut too hard for my hammer. I have turned it and tapped it on every corner that seemed hopeful without making so much as a crack in it. Tambernic and Pietrapana might fall on it in vain. I must have expressed myself clumsily in my last letter. I did not mean to counsel paraphrase in the text, but at foot of page for the help of the Philistine to whom all poetry is a dead language. At best the translation of a poem is a waxen image of the living original, and being too literal is to dress it in the very clothes it wore as if the reality were in them.
“I do not know whether I told you that my last attack of gout had left me more infirm than ever before. I am still lame in both feet, though I insist on walking in the hope of getting limber and because without exercise I can’t sleep. We have had disastrous weather here, a cold of Antenora, with fierce winds to drive it in. Even the stones of the Abbey seem to feel it and shudder. I am sitting by a fire as I write. For the first time I begin to think myself capable of growing old.[104]
“I am in the same lodgings as last year, which is a pleasure to me, with kind, simple people, who do all they can to make me happy. They are very like our New England country folk, except in accent, almost the same thing in fact.”
In this letter Lowell intimates one of the physical ills that were attacking him, the loss of sleep. One of his friends and admirers, Canon Stubbs, gave this reminiscence,[105] not long after Lowell’s death. “Some years ago,” he writes, “I was in the habit of meeting him from time to time at the country house of a common friend. One especial evening—a ‘golden night of memory’—I shall never forget. After dinner one of the guests asked Lowell to read one of his own poems. This request he playfully put aside, but he began to talk to us about Wordsworth, and read to us part of the ‘Laodamia,’ commenting, as he read, much I confess to my surprise, on the narrowness and limited experience of Wordsworth, and the one-sided development of his intellectual powers. Then some chance expression turned the current of his talk, and he began describing, with all the quaint humor and delightful raillery of which he was so complete a master, a special antidote to sleeplessness which he said he had himself lately devised,—the invention of new chapters in Cæsar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. I wish I could remember the chapter which he then recited. The aptness of the Latin phraseology was irresistibly funny. It told ‘how Vercingetorix and his army, retreating before Cæsar, had taken refuge on a high, rocky hill, strongly fortified and precipitous on every side, from which at first Cæsar had despaired of dislodging him without a long siege. But while Cæsar was considering these things an opportunity of acting successfully seemed to offer. He noticed a fissure in the rock, which on investigation by night was discovered to pierce the hill from side to side. [Here we expected the anachronism of dynamite or gunpowder. But no; Lowell more justly appreciated the natural genius of Cæsar.] Knowing that the winter was now nigh at hand, Cæsar ordered two legions of soldiers to block up with clay and twisted willow work the opposite ends of the rocky cleft, and then, having filled the chasm with water, to await the issue. That night the frost came; the water expanded; the high rock was cleft asunder; and down came Vercingetorix and his army. For this success’—Lowell concluded—‘a supplication of twenty days was decreed by the Senate upon receiving Cæsar’s letter.’”
After a visit to St. Ives, Lowell returned to London and remained there till the middle of November. His friends the Misses Lawrence were at Wildbad. As he never quite finished his couplets to Mrs. Gilder, so he never quite exhausted the playful names he gave these two ladies. “O Giminy,” he wrote from London, 1 October “(for I have exhausted all other ways of expressing your twinship in my affection, and any opening exclamation will suit the context), O Giminy, I say, how can you be happy in a hotel that Klumpps with a double p like a man with a club foot, and in a town which, by its own confession, is both wild and bad? What are you doing there? Taking the baths? You can’t soak the goodness out of you, if you try never so hard, that’s one comfort. You ‘admired the traces of the Romans at Treves’ did you? Pray, did you see the Holy Coat? That is what the place is famous for, bless your innocent souls. And then your single room at Munich with ‘2 or 3 Bismarcks, as many Gladstones and Döllingers’ in it. Do you expect me to believe that? It would have been uninhabitable had there been only one apiece of them, and you know it. You trifle with my understanding. Smoky London, indeed! The sky to-day is like a gigantic blue bell tipped over to pour out the sunshine it cannot contain. And the town is emptily delightful and one does not see a soul one knows from one end of the week to t’other. I shouldn’t mind its being fuller by a dozen or so, my Ambidue among them. Indeed, I was thinking yesterday of writing to ask where you were and when you were coming back to the lovers who (all but one of them) make me so jealous. The middle of October seems a great way off to that single inoffensive one, but ’tis better than nothing. I shall be here till the middle of November, and you will let me know the moment you come, won’t you?
“I haven’t the least notion where Wildbad is, and you give no geographical details, so I don’t feel sure that this will ever reach the Hôtel Klumpppppp though there can’t be two of that name even in this most patient of worlds. Did Wagner ever set it to music? Methinks ’twould have suited his emphatic and somewhat halting genius. But I shall try for a guide-book, and if this never reaches you, I shall be consoled with thinking that you will never know how little you have lost.
“I am very well, almost as well as before my gout; but I am rather dull, as you were just saying to each other. However, your return will brighten me, and you shall take me to the play and the opera and Madame Tussaud’s just as often as you please. And I invite myself to dine with you too—I mean two. Am I not generous? The nearer I get to the end of my sheet (like a prisoner escaping and doubtful where he was going to drop) the more I wonder where Wildbad is. I shall ask at a foreign book-shop. That is the simplest plan, for they are all kept by German Jews who know every place where Christians are plundered the world over. And if a Bad of any kind does not come within that definition I am greatly mistaken. My only doubt would be as to whether you were Christians? Well, you have always treated me as if you were. Good-by.”