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successor of Rachel and Ristori—a blonde Rachel, tall and slender and stately and fearfully ill like her—but oh!
such power, such expression by a glance, a whisper, a motion of the hand and such utter absence of the visibly histrionic.’
Normandy was the next country to be visited, and there
Colonel Higginson stayed with friends, going thence to
Germany.
Le Manier, Penne de Pie near Honfleur, Normandy.
Here I am at this perfectly charming place . . . wonderfully silent and deep, and delightful after Paris, and it was pleasant to go to sleep and not know what the morning would reveal.
I was waked by the bells for early mass in the old church opposite, 800 years old. My windows look upon the sea. . . . Once a day an old man comes with the mail, and once a day the omnibus goes by each way between Honfleur and Trouville,—that is all.
‘I got here this morning,’ he wrote from
Cologne, ‘leaving beautiful
Normandy and dear friends with difficulty . . . . I shall not feel solitary on the
Rhine, having Bettine's correspondence with me and meaning to visit some of her places.’
Apropos of Bettine, these passages occur in one of the diaries:—
Just now I am reading Gunderode with ever-new delight: I wish there were a million volumes.
Really there is not an author in the world, save Emerson
