Again he made a long sojourn in
Europe, resigned his Harvard professorship, and in 1877 was
appointed Minister to Spain. After three years he was transferred
to the most important post in our diplomatic service, London. He
performed his duties with extraordinary skill and success until
1885, when he was relieved. His last years were spent in Elmwood,
the Cambridge house where he was born, and he was still writing,
in almost as rich a vein as ever, when the end came in 1891.
Here was certainly a full and varied life, responsive to many
personal moods and many tides of public feeling. Lowell drew
intellectual stimulus from enormously wide reading in classical
and modern literatures. Puritanically earnest by inheritance, he
seems also to have inherited a strain of levity which he could
not always control, and, through his mother's family, a dash of
mysticism sometimes resembling second sight. His physical and
mental powers were not always in the happiest mutual adjustment:
he became easily the prey of moods and fancies, and knew the
alternations from wild gaiety of spirits to black despair.
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