Chapter XV · THE ENGLISH MISSION 1880-1885 (continued 2)

In fulfilling a wish of his wife, Lowell wrote to his old friend, Mrs. W. W. Story, 31 March: “I send you General Wallace’s book by to-day’s post. It was touchingly characteristic that I should find it on her writing-desk done up and addressed to you. She never forgot or neglected a duty. But, not knowing the requirements of the Post Office, she had closed it at both ends, and sealed it. So I was obliged, much to my regret, to have it done up in the right way. But I ordered her original address to be left inside that it might show she had not forgotten.

“I am on the whole glad to be rid of my official trammels and trappings. I do not know yet when my successor will arrive, but hardly look for him before July. I shall then go home, but whether to stay or not will be decided after I have looked about me there. If I decide to stay I shall certainly visit the Old World pretty regularly, and shall be sure to turn up in Rome.”

Lowell added one more to his public addresses before leaving England, that delivered on unveiling the bust of Coleridge, in Westminster Abbey, 7 May, 1885. It is a slight, graceful performance, but in it I think we may hear now and then that echo of his own thought about himself which we have more than once caught in his addresses, as when he says: “His critical sense rose like a forbidding apparition in the path of his poetic production;” and again: “We are here to-day not to consider what Coleridge owed to himself, to the family, or to the world, but what we owe to him. Let us at least not volunteer to draw his frailties from their dread abode. Our own are a far more profitable subject of contemplation. Let the man of imaginative temperament, who has never procrastinated, who has made all that was possible of his powers, cast the first stone.”

Early in June, 1885, Lowell left England, that held his wife’s grave, and returned lonely to his old home.