[406]
We leave on the San Jacinto next Saturday, and I am making the most of the few charming hours yet left; for never did we have so delicious a spring.
I never knew such altogether perfect weather.
It is enough to make a saint out of the toughest old Calvinist that ever set his face as a flint.
How do you think New England theology would have fared if our fathers had been landed here instead of on Plymouth Rock?
The next you hear of me will be at the North, where our address is Forest Street, Hartford.
We have bought a pretty cottage there, near to Belle, and shall spend the summer there.
In a letter written in May of the following year to her son Charles, at Harvard,
Mrs. Stowe says:
I can hardly realize that this long, flowery summer, with its procession of blooms and fruit, has been running on at the same time with the snowbanks and sleet storms of the North.
But so it is. It is now the first of May.
Strawberries and blackberries are over with us; oranges are in a waning condition, few and far between.
Now we are going North to begin another summer, and have roses, strawberries, blackberries, and green peas come again.
I am glad to hear of your reading.
The effect produced on you by Jonathan Edwards is very similar to that produced on me when I took the same mental bath.
His was a mind whose grasp and intensity you cannot help feeling.
He was a poet in the intensity of his conceptions, and some of his sermons are more terrible than Dante's “Inferno.”
In November, 1874, upon their return to Mandarin,
