but never went any further with it. He wrote some verses which were printed in the magazines; and he seems, indeed, to have been anxious for prudential reasons to write as much as possible. His profits at this time from the royalties on his books were only two thousand dollars a year, and his other income was not always quite adequate to his generous desires. In sending a group of poems to Mr. T. B. Aldrich, then editor of the "Atlantic," he wrote: ELMWOOD, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., 8th May, 1890. DEAR ALDRICH, — If you think these things worthy a place in the "Atlantic," send me a hundred dollars and print 'em. If not, return 'em and I will find a market elsewhere. I must pay my doctor's bills. I was very near leaving 'em for my heirs to pay, which would have saved me money, but it was ordered that I should n't go yet. They are not potboilers, these things, though I now thrust them under the pot. The sonnet I have been carrying about in my head these six years and at last wrote it down to try whether my wits were damaged or no. Perhaps they areyou must judge. The Fielding I had forgotten and found written on the back of a letter. I wrote it when I unveiled the bust of F. at Taunton, but never offered it to the burghers of that town. I am very well, I think, and loiter about my grounds a little, but Dr. Wyman insists that I shall be quiet, and especially that I shall not walk more than a quarter of a mile a day, which is prison rations for me. He was here just now and I thought he would raise his interdict, but he would n't. Faithfully yours, J. R. LOWELL. The ill health referred to at the close of this letter became graver and still graver. He had been very dangerously ill in the spring of 1890, and though he recovered, it was only to have relapse follow relapse until the end. He told Mr. Howells that he had gone to Beaver Brook and tried to jump from one stone to another in the stream but had to give it up, and he said, without completing his sentence, "If it has come to that with me!" It was, of course, out of the question for him to make his wonted trip to England in the summer; but he was in part compensated for this loss by a visit from Leslie Stephen, the closest of his English friends, who spent some weeks with him at Elmwood in the summer; and he occupied his mind in writing an introduction to Milton's Areopagitica," published by the Grolier Club of New York. With a brief paper in the Con 66 tributors' Club of the "Atlantic," this was his last prose. Through the winter of 1890 and 1891 his health wavered, and he was able to go about but little and to do little serious reading. He read endless novels, however, in which he found a singular pleasure. As he wrote to Leslie Stephen, "I never read so many before, I think, in my life, and they come to me as fresh as the fairy tales of my boyhood." He helped his grandchildren, somewhat modestly, with their Greek, and played with his dogs. He wrote to Mrs. Stephen in February, 1891: "I wish you could see the dogs lying before my fire, each making a pillow of the other and looking around to me from time to time lest I should forget that they loved me. Human eyes have generally precious little soul in them, but with theirs there comes sometimes the longing for a soul and almost overtaking it that is desperately touching." This is the last of the numerous allusions in his letters to the canine succession of Argus, Bessie, Bram, Stoker, Pank, and Gobble. He had been all his life as true a dog-lover as Sir Walter Scott. Perhaps the most vivid picture we have of him at the last is that written by a young Englishman, who, having known Lowell in his London days, had gone to see him at Elmwood in the |