with Albert Dürer's towers, and such a cataract of ivy falling over them as was never seen! The difference between Augsburg and Nürnberg is that between the account of a dream at breakfast, where one is surrounded by prose, and the dream itself. I don't believe the Germans know how precious Nürnberg is, because the people who lived there couldn't write Von before their names, although they produced more art (Dürer and Sachs) than all the rest of Germany put together, besides licking thoroughly the accumulated Vons of two neighboring dukedoms. The day I spent in Nürnberg I walked over the whole town and half round the walls on the outside, and pleased myself with thinking what a capital cicerone I should be when I saw it with you. Catch me studying up another town for such faithless persons! . . . TO MRS. ESTES HOWE Dresden, July 2, 1856. I am a great deal better than I was last winter. I have still some kind of trouble in the side, but I have got used to it, and it does not have such an intolerably depressing effect on my spirits as it did six months ago, when I was really half crazy. It was not my own fault, for I did everything I could and resisted to the utmost, but, for all that, I look back upon last winter as the most wretched of my life except one. So if my irritability cropped out in my letters at all, pray forgive it. I am all right now, and as sensible as a select man. ... ... TO MISS NORTON Paris, July 12, 1856. You do not speak of Titian's "Assumption" among your pictures. Don't you admire it? If you don't, you have not seen it. I did not till the last time I was there. I think it the most splendid piece of color in the world. And who ever saw such clouds on canvas? Clouds that are not pretty like Correggio's, nor puff-balls like Raphael's, but the very vapor of morning Hippocrene conjured up by Apollo to make rainbows in for Phaeton when he was a baby, or for some goddess to hide in-water and light and air in musical proportion, and glowing as if the goddess were already hidden in it. The little angels, too! was there ever anything so lovely? Such endless variety in the attitudes, not one sprawling or awkward or making you feel uncomfortable for fear it should fall, but all floating as if it were as much their nature to float as bubbles. They mingle so charmingly with the cloud that you can fancy that if you wait you will see the whole of it transmuted into such heavenly butterflies by the touch of the Virgin's feet. Do you remember Domenichino's cherubs in the "Communion of St. Jerome"? They look as if they had been tossed up there by a mad bull, and you pity the poor little red dears, who have evidently just been whipped by their unnatural mothers, and who (to judge by their expression) are expecting another whipping when they tumble (as they instantly must) for having been naughty enough to be tossed at all. The painters find it commonly very hard to bring up these angelic children of theirs prop erly, and they look mostly like chérubins terribles whom one wishes out of the way; but those of Titian are altogether delightful-little Cupids who have been baptized into the Church without losing a bit of their animal spirits, and who would contrive to get bows and arrows to make mischief with if ever they got into a nunnery. And those two hundred pounds of solid Venetian woman-how irresistibly they go up! No danger of her slumping through the clouds to dislocate the neck of some poor apostle below, a consummation which one is apt to expect in compositions of the kind. Then the wonderful atmosphere-but basta! Did you learn to love John Bellini? and Cima da Conegliano? And did you see the beautiful throned Madonna, with saints and angiolini below, by—I can't recall his name, but it hangs to the left of the "Presentation"? . . IV 1856-1865 RETURN FROM EUROPE. ENTERS UPON THE DUTIES OF HIS PROFESSORSHIP.-MARRIAGE TO MISS DUNLAP.-EDITORSHIP 66 OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.-NEW SERIES OF THE BIG- LETTERS TO H. W. LONGFELLOW, MISS NORTON, C. E. NORTON, IN the summer of 1856 Lowell returned from Europe, and in the autumn entered upon his regular duties as professor. Admirably accomplished as he was for their performance, and fitted, by sympathy with youthful students no less than by natural gifts and acquired learning, for the post of teacher, he nevertheless found its exactions irksome, and the demand which it made upon him such as to interfere more or less with the free exercise of his poetic faculty. His lectures during the twenty years which he held the professorship had a wide range through the fields of Modern Literature, and were such as college students have rarely had the good-fortune to hear. In the summer of 1857 the happiness of his life was renewed by his marriage to Miss Frances Dunlap. She was a woman of remarkable gifts and graces of person and character, and from this time, for many years, their domestic life was of exceptional felicity. In the autumn of the same year he undertook the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, a new venture, which under his guidance speedily took the leading place among American literary periodicals. He held the position of editor for nearly four years, devoting much time to its duties. Shortly after resigning its editorship into the competent hands of Mr. James T. Fields he became joint editor with me of the North American Review, which, mainly through his contributions to its pages, regained its old distinction as an organ of the best contemporary thought in America. During the years of the Rebellion his writings were among the most powerful and effective expressions of the sentiment and opinions of the North. Once more Hosea Biglow uttered the voice of the people; and at the end of the war the "Commemoration Ode" gave expression in its nobly inspired strophes to the true heart of the nation. Few poets have ever rendered such service to their country as Lowell rendered in these years. TO H. W. LONGFELLOW Cambridge, Aug. 16, 1856. My dear Philoctetes,-I was not, I confess, half so sorry for your accident as I ought to have been, because it will give you to me as a neighbor for some time longer.* * Longfellow had been prevented by a lameness from an intended voyage to Europe. |