He returned to his home whistling, however, showing that his courage and resolution had not abated.
In Europe he was often forced to live on twenty cents a day for weeks on account of his poverty.

He returned to London with only thirty cents left.

He tried to sell a poem of twelve hundred lines, which he had in his knapsack, but no publisher wanted it.

Of that time he wrote: "My situation was about as hopeless as it is possible to conceive." But his will defied circumstances and he rose above them.

For two years he lived on two hundred and fifty dollars a year in London, earning every dollar of it with his pen.
His untimely death in 1879, at fifty-four, when Minister to Berlin, was lamented by the learned and great of all countries.
We are told of a young New York inventor who about twenty years ago spent every dollar he was worth in an experiment, which, if successful, would introduce his invention to public notice and insure his fortune, and, what he valued more, his usefulness.