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that happened during his first visit to Rome.
Lowell and his wife took lodgings with a respectable elderly Italian woman whose husband was in a sickly condition.
One morning she met him in the passageway with tearful eyes and said: ““Un grana disgrazie” happened last night,--my poor husband went to heaven.”
Lowell wondered why there was a pope in Rome if going to heaven was considered a disgrace there.
Longfellow's resignation of his professorship at Harvard was a rare piece of good fortune for Lowell; for it was the only position of the kind that he could have obtained there or anywhere else.
In fact, it was a question whether the appointment would be confirmed on account of his transcendental tendencies, and his connection with the Anti-slavery Standard; but Longfellow threw the whole weight of his influence in Lowell's favor, and this would seem to have decided it. From this time till 1873 Lowell was more of a prose-writer than a poet, and his essays on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and other English poets are the best of their kind, --not brilliant, but appreciative, penetrating, and well-considered.
Wasson said of him that no other critic in the English tongue came so near to expressing the inexpressible as Lowell.
One could wish that his studies in Shakespeare had been more extended.
He treats the
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