previous next
[349] were also joined by their Brooklyn friends, the Howards. Thus it was a large and thoroughly congenial party that settled down in the old Italian city to spend the winter. From here Mrs. Stowe wrote weekly letters to her husband in Andover, and among them are the following, that not only throw light upon their mode of life, but illustrate a marked tendency of her mind:--

Florence, Christmas Day, 1859.
My dear husband,--I wish you all a Merry Christmas, hoping to spend the next one with you.

For us, we are expecting to spend this evening with quite a circle of American friends. With Scoville and Fred came L. Bacon (son of Dr. Bacon); a Mr. Porter, who is to study theology at Andover, and is now making the tour of Europe; Mr. Clarke, formerly minister at Cornwall; Mr. Jenkyns, of Lowell; Mr.Howard and Mrs. Howard, John and Annie Howard, who came in most unexpectedly upon us last night. So we shall have quite a New England party, and shall sing Millais' Christmas hymn in great force. Hope you will all do the same in the old stone cabin.

Our parlor is all trimmed with laurel and myrtle, looking like a great bower, and our mantel and table are redolent with bouquets of orange blossoms and pinks.


January 16, 1860.
My dear husband,--Your letter received to-day has raised quite a weight from my mind, for it shows that at last you have received all mine, and that thus the chain of communication between us is unbroken. What you said about your spiritual experiences in feeling


Houghton, Mifflin and Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1889.

Tufts University provided support for entering this text.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
New England (United States) (1)
Florence (Italy) (1)
Europe (1)
Cornwall (United Kingdom) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Annie Howard (3)
L. Bacon (2)
Fred Stowe (1)
Samuel Scoville (1)
Harriet Porter (1)
James Russell Lowell (1)
Jenkyns (1)
Clarke (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
January 16th, 1860 AD (1)
December 25th, 1859 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: