1890 In June Santayana sails from New York for Liverpool. During the summer he first visits Queen’s Acre, novelist Howard Sturgis’s home near Windsor Park, England, which he is to visit almost yearly until Sturgis’s death in 1920. He spends part of July and August in Ávila. Sailing from Liverpool on 3 September on the Teutonic, Santayana returns to America and moves into rooms at No. 7, Stoughton Hall, the Harvard Yard, where he will spend six winters. About this time he begins his “Poetry Bees”: regular meetings held in his rooms with a group of student friends for the purpose of reading aloud from the celebrated poets. This practice is continued for several years before being discontinued and is revived in 1910–11, with Conrad Aiken as the lead- ing light among the student members. Also, at about this time, Santayana, William Vaughn Moody, Norman Hapgood, Boylston Beal, and others, as a lark, found the Laodicean Club at Harvard, and Santayana is elected “Pope” by the membership.
1891 Santayana sails from Boston to Liverpool in June aboard the Cephalonia. He makes his first visit to Telegraph House (or “T.H.”), Earl Russell’s estate on the South Downs in Hampshire, England, where Santayana is to be a regular vis- itor until 1923. He visits Ávila in August and returns to Boston in September.
1892 Santayana spends the summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the autumn he makes his first visit to Yale, where he is invited by William Lyon Phelps to watch the Harvard-Yale football game. Santayana is writing “nothing but poetry” at this time. On 26 November his half sister, Susana, then forty-one, marries Celedonio Sastre of Ávila, a widower with six children. On 16 December, Santayana’s twenty-ninth birthday, he gives a dinner party for a group of Harvard friends: “one of the pleasantest memories of my life.”
1893 Santayana’s father dies at age 79 during summer in Ávila; Santayana’s student and friend Warwick Potter dies in October; at the end of this year Santayana undergoes his metanoia or fundamental change of heart, resulting in renunciation of the world. Spends a year at Cambridge University; appears in court in October to testify on behalf of Frank Russell, defending against charges by his estranged wife.
1894 Santayana remains in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the summer. Earl Russell, en route to San Francisco, spends a week with him in Cambridge. Santayana’s first book, Sonnets and Other Verses, is published by Stone and Kimball in Cambridge and Chicago.
1895 In Cambridge, Massachusetts, until June, Santayana again sails from New York to Gibraltar on the Werra. During the summer, he visits Earl Russell at his “ugly villa” at Maidenhead, England, and meets Mrs. Marion Sommerville, who is later to divorce her husband and become Russell’s second wife (“Countess Mollie”). During this summer, Santayana also travels in Italy with Charles Loeser and makes a one-hundred-fifty-mile walking tour through France to Switzerland with Guy Murchie. He returns to Cambridge in late September, sailing from London to New York on a cattle steamer.
1896 Santayana’s first book-length prose work is published by Scribner’s: The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. The second edition of Sonnets, containing the thirty new sonnets of the Second Sonnet Series, also is published by Stone and Kimball in this year. Andreas Martin Andersen makes his charcoal drawing, which becomes Santayana’s favorite portrait of himself. On 28 June Santayana sails from Quebec on the Parisian, bound for Liverpool and a year’s leave of absence from Harvard. He plans to spend a year in advanced study at Cambridge University. From late July through early September, he is in Oxford. Early in October he visits Bertrand Russell at Haslemere, England; in September he begins a four-week stay in Maidenhead, England. He also appears in court in Winchester on 9 or 10 October to testify on behalf of Frank Russell, against whom charges were brought by the Earl’s estranged first wife, Mabel Edith, and her mother, Lady Lena Scott. Afterwards, Santayana goes immediately from Winchester to Cambridge, where he is admitted as an advanced student to King’s College, with the stand- ing of Master of Arts. His Cambridge friends include Nathaniel Wedd, G. Lowes Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and J. M. E. McTaggart. He studies Plato under the direction of Henry Jackson of Trinity College. That December Santayana testifies on behalf of the “wicked Earl,” as Russell’s noto- rious courtroom adventures caused him to be designated by the journalists, at the trial of Lady Scott and her codefendants for libel, held at the Old Bailey in London. They are convicted and sentenced to eight months at hard labor, but Russell intercedes to reduce the severity of Lady Scott’s punishment. Santayana spends the Christmas holidays in Paris with club acquaintances at Harvard, who are studying at the Beaux Arts.
1897 Santayana resumes teaching at Harvard; lives with his mother.
1898 Santayana promoted from instructor to assistant professor.
1899 Santayana’s Lucifer, a mythological tragedy, is published in Chicago and New York by H. S. Stone. Santayana sails from New York to Southampton in June and spends the summer at Oxford completing work on the manuscript of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. He visits the Robert B. Potters at Sainte Marguerite and then spends two weeks with Susana and her family in Ávila before sailing to Quebec from Liverpool in September.