He told Professor Hedge an amusing incident 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
gran' 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 subject as if he felt it was too great for him; but he was the
first to take notice that the play of Richard III. indicated in its
main extent a different hand, and it is now generally admitted to have
been the work of Fletcher. With the keenest insight he noticed that the
magician Prospero was an impersonation of Shakespeare himself; and George
Brandes, the most thoroughgoing of Shakespearean scholars, afterwards
came to the same conclusion.