ut rather for pleasurable excitement than with a deep poetic feeling.
Her imperfect vision and her bad health were serious impediments to intimacy with woods and rivers.
She had never paid,—and it is a little remarkable,—any attention to natural sciences.
She neither botanized, nor geologized, nor dissected.
Still she delighted in short country rambles, in the varieties of landscape, in pastoral country, in mountain outlines, and, above all, in the sea-shore.
At Nantasket Beach, and at Newport, she spent a month or two of many successive summers.
She paid homage to rocks, woods, flowers, rivers, and the moon.
She spent a good deal of time out of doors, sitting, perhaps, with a book in some sheltered recess commanding a landscape.
She watched, by day and by night, the skies and the earth, and believed she knew all their expressions.
She wrote in her journal, or in her correspondence, a series of moonlights, in which she seriously attempts to describe the light and scenery of s
ronne, he says: It was in his printing-house that I was put to prentice; not having been able to learn orthography, he imparted to me the taste for poetry, gave me lessons in versification, and corrected my first essays.
Of Bonaparte,—
Un conquerant, dans sa fortune altiere, Se fit un jeu des sceptres et des lois, Et de ses pieds on peut voir la poussiere Empreinte encore sur le bandeau des rois.
I admire, also, Le Violon brise, for its grace and sweetness.
How fine Beranger on Waterloo!—
Its name shall never sadden verse of mine.
To R. W. E. Niagara, 1st June, 1843.
I send you a token, made by the hands of some Seneca Indian lady.
If you use it for a watch-pocket, hang it, when you travel, at the head of your bed, and you may dream of Niagara.
If you use it for a purse, you can put in it alms for poets and artists, and the subscription-money you receive for Mr. Carlyle's book.
His book, as it happened, you gave me as a birthday gift, and you may take thi
