The furlough which Lowell had taken greatly refreshed him, and he took up his life again with vigor and gayety, applying himself not only to the duties of the legation, but to the better acquisition of the Spanish language, a fuller knowledge of the literature, and the study of those larger matters of Spanish polity and character with which it became a minister to acquaint himself. “I have come back,” he wrote to his daughter, “a new man, and have flung my _blue_ spectacles into the paler Mediterranean. I really begin to find life at last tolerable here, nay, to enjoy it after a fashion.”
Here is an outline of his days, as he gives it in a letter to a friend: “Get up at 8, from 9 sometimes till 11 my Spanish professor, at 11 breakfast, at 12 to the legation, at 3 home again and a cup of chocolate, then read the papers and write Spanish till a quarter to 7, at 7 dinner, and at 8 drive in an open carriage in the Prado till 10, to bed at 12 to 1. In cooler weather we drive in the afternoon. I am very well,--cheerful and no gout.”
He set to work systematically on Spanish with a cultivated Spaniard who could speak no English, and with whom he read and talked every day, besides turning French and English literature into Spanish. “I am working now at Spanish,” he writes, 2 August, 1878, “as I used to work at Old French--that is, all the time and with all my might. I mean to know it better than they do themselves--which isn’t saying much. Considering how hard it has always been for me to _speak_ a language--even one I knew pretty well--I am making good progress, for I did not begin till my return six weeks ago. Before that I hadn’t the spirit for it.” Of his tutor, Don Herminigildo Gines de los Rios, he adds: “He is a fine young fellow who lost a professor’s chair for his liberal principles, and is now professor in the Free University they are trying to found here. I like him very much.”
Three months later he wrote: “I am beginning to talk Spanish pretty well, but my previous knowledge of the language is a great hindrance. This may seem a paradox, but it isn’t. What I mean is that I know too much to catch it by ear. I understand all that is said to me, and accordingly cannot (without a conscious effort) pay attention to the forms of speech. They go in at one ear and out at the other. But I can write it now with considerable ease and correctness. I am to be admitted to the Academy this month, I believe.”