a turkey-cock's quill, they actually gobble in the pugnacity of their
style, and as it lies by me, the very paper goes fr-fr-fr. But you shall
keep that identical picture, my dearest, since you have grown to like
it; so shake your feathers smooth again, funny woman that you are! and
let your soul return into its rest.
Sully is now in England. I wish there were any chance of your seeing
him, but after remaining there long enough to paint the queen, he
intends visiting Paris for a short time and then returning home. He is a
great friend of mine, and one of the few people here that I find
pleasure in associating with. As his delicacy about being paid for the
picture arose from the idea that, not being satisfied with the likeness,
you probably did not care to keep it, I have no doubt that, the present
state of your regard for it being made clear to him, he will not object
any more to receiving the price of it.
I presume that the long chapter you have written me upon the
inevitability of people's folly and the expediency of believing, first,
that God makes us fools, and then that he punishes us for behaving like
fools, is a result of your impeded circulation, under the effect of the
east wind upon your cuticle. How I wish, without the bitter month's
sea-sickness, you could be here beside me now, this 24th of March,
between an open window and door, and with my fire dying out; to be sure,
as I have just been taking two monstrous unruly dogs to a pond at some
distance from the house, for a swim, and as S---- was with me and I had
to carry her (now a pretty heavy lump) through several mud passages, the
agreeable glow in which I feel myself may not be altogether due to the
warmth of the atmosphere, although it is really as hot as our last of
May. How I wish you could spend the summer with me! How you would
rejoice in the heat, to me so hateful and intolerable! To persons of
your temperament, I suppose hell, instead of the popular idea of fire
and brimstone, presents some such frigid horror as poor Claudio's:
"thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice."
I was walking once with Trelawney, who is as chilly as an Italian
greyhound, at Niagara, by a wall of rock, upon which the intense sun
beat, and was reflected upon us till I felt as if I was being roasted
alive, and exclaimed, "Oh, this is hell itself!" to which he replied
with a grunt of dissatisfaction, "Oh, dear, I hope hell will be a great
deal _warmer_ than this!"
In my observation about the development of our filial affections after
we become parents ourselves, I may have fallen into my usual error of
generalizing from too narrow a basis, and taken it for granted that my
own experience is necessarily that of others.... But after all, though
_everybody_ is not like me, _somebody_ must be, and one's self is
therefore a safe source from whence to draw conclusions with regard to
others, up to a certain point. Made of the same element, however
diversely fashioned and tempered by various influences, we still are all
alike in the main ingredients of our humanity; and it must be quite as
contrary to sound sense to imagine the processes of one's own mind
singular, as to suppose them universal.
Profound truism! but truisms are profound--they lie at the foundations
of existence--for they are truths.
My journal is fast disappearing behind the fire. How I wish I had spent
the time I wasted in writing it, in making extracts from the books I
read!...
I wrote my sister a long answer, by Mrs. Jameson, to her last letter, in
which I entered at some length upon the various objections to a public
life; not that I was then aware of the decision she has now adopted of
going upon the stage--a decision, however, for which I have been
entirely prepared ever since my visit to England and my return home....
I hope she may succeed to the fullest extent of her desires, for I do
not think that hers is a nature that would be benefited by the bitter
medicine of disappointment. Oh, how I wish she could once enter some
charmed sphere of peace and happiness! The discipline of happiness, in
which I have infinite faith, would I think be of infinite use to her,
but--God knows best.... I am anxious, too, that her experiment of a life
of excitement should be the most favorable possible, that, under its
happiest aspect, she may learn how remote it is from happiness.... Had
she remained in England, I should have rejoiced to think that Mrs.
Somerville was her friend: such a friend would be God's minister to the
heart and mind of any young woman. It is not a small source of regret to
me, to think of how much inestimable human intercourse my residence in
America deprives me.
I think my father's selecting Paris for the first trial of my sister's
abilities a mistake; and I am very, _very_ anxious about the result.
Natural talent is sufficient for a certain degree of success in acting,
but not in singing, where the expression of feeling, the dramatic
portion of the performance, is so severely trammeled by mechanical
difficulties: the execution of which is all but rendered impossible by
the slightest trepidation, the tone of the voice itself being often
fatally affected by the loss of self-possession.
Pasta and Malibran both failed _at first_ in Paris, and I confess I
shall be most painfully anxious till I hear the issue of this
experiment....
I am in the garden from morning till night, but am too impatient for
mortal roots and branches. I should have loved the sort of planting
described in Tieck's "Elves," where they stamp a pine-cone into the
earth, and presently a fir-tree springs up, and, rising towards the sky
with the happy children who plant it, rocks them on its topmost
branches, to and fro in the red sunset.
Good-bye, God bless you.
I am ever your affectionate,
F. A. B.
[Many years after these letters were written, in 1845, when I
joined my sister in Rome, I found her living in the most cordial
intimacy with the admirable woman whose acquaintance I had coveted
for her and for myself.
My year's residence in Rome gave me frequent opportunities of
familiar intercourse with Mrs. Somerville, whose European celebrity,
the result of her successful devotion to the highest scientific
studies, enhanced the charm of her domestic virtues, her tender
womanly character, and perfect modesty and simplicity of manner.
During my last visit to Rome, in 1873, speaking to the old blind
Duke of Sermoneta, of my desire to go to Naples to pay my respects
to Mrs. Somerville, who was then residing there, at an extremely
advanced age, he said, "Elle est si bonne, si savante, et si
charmante, que la mort n'ose point la toucher." I was unable to
carry out my plan of going to Naples, and Mrs. Somerville did not
long survive the period at which I had hoped to have visited her.
Early in our acquaintance I had expressed some curiosity, not
unmixed with dread, upon the subject of scorpions, never having seen
one. Mrs. Somerville laughed, and said that a sojourn in Italy was
sure to introduce them sooner or later to me. The next time that I
spent the evening with her after this conversation, as I stood by
the chimney talking to her, I suddenly perceived a most
detestable-looking black creature on the mantelpiece. I started back
in horror to my hostess's great delight, as she had been at the
pains of cutting out in black paper an imitation scorpion, for my
edification, and was highly satisfied with the impression it
produced upon me.
Urania's reptile, however, was the conventional mythical scorpion of
the Zodiac, and only vaguely represented the evil-looking, venomous
beast with which I subsequently became, according to her prophecy,
acquainted, in all its natural living repulsiveness.
Besides this sample scorpion, which I have carefully preserved, I
have two drawings which Mrs. Somerville made for me; one, a delicate
outline sketch of what is called Othello's House in Venice, and the
other, a beautifully executed colored copy of his shield, surmounted
by the Doge's cap, and bearing three mulberries for a
device,--proving the truth of the assertion, that the _Otelli del
Moro_ were a noble Venetian folk, who came originally from the
Morea, whose device was the mulberry, the growth of that country,
and showing how curious a jumble Shakespeare has made, both of name
and device, in calling him a _Moor_ and embroidering his arms on
his handkerchief as _strawberries_. In Cinthio's novel, from which
Shakespeare probably took his story, the husband is a Moor, and I
think called by no other name.]
PHILADELPHIA, May 7th, 1838.
DEAREST HARRIET,
I fear this will scarce reach you before you leave England upon your
German pilgrimage, but I presume it will follow you, and be welcome
wherever it finds you.
Do you hear that the steamships have accomplished their crossing from
England to America in perfect safety, the one in seventeen, the other in
fifteen days! just half the usual time, thirty days being the average of
the finest passages this way. Oh, if you knew what joy this intelligence
gave me! It seemed at once to bring me again within reach of England and
all those whom I love there.
And even though I should not therefore return thither the oftener, the
speed and certainty with which letters will now pass between these two
worlds, hitherto so far apart, is a thing to rejoice at exceedingly.
Besides all personal considerations in the matter, the wonder and
delight of seeing this great enterprise of man's ingenuity and courage
thus successful is immense. One of the vessels took her departure for
England the other day, filled with passengers, and sent from the wharf
with a thousand acclamations and benedictions. The mere report of it
overcame me with emotion; thus to see space annihilated, and the
furthest corners of the earth drawn together, fills one with admiration
for this amazing human nature, more potent than the whole material
creation by which it is surrounded, even than the three thousand miles
of that Atlantic abyss. These manifestations of the power of man's
intellect seem to me to cry aloud to him to "stand in awe [of his own
nature] and sin not." And yet these victories over matter are nothing
compared to the achievements of human souls, with their powers of faith,
of love, and of endurance. I will not, however, inflict further
exclamations upon you....
Certainly mere details of personal being, doing, and suffering are of
some value when one would almost give one's eyes for a moment's sight of
the bodily presence of the soul one loves: so you shall have my present
history; which is, that at this immediate writing, I am sitting in a
species of verandah (or piazza, as they call it here), which runs along
the front of the house. It has a low balustrade and columns of
white-painted wood, supporting a similar verandah on the second or
bedroom story of the house; the sitting-rooms are all on the ground
floor. It is Sunday morning, but I am obliged to be content with such
devotions and admonitions as I can enjoy here, from within and around
me, as my plight does not admit of my leaving home....
I am sorry to say that the fact of letters miscarrying between this
country and England has been very disagreeably proved to me this morning
by the receipt of one from dear William Harness, who mentions having
written another to me five months ago, which other has never yet made
its appearance, and I presume would hardly think it worth while to do so
now.
We have had an uncommonly mild winter, without, I think, more than a
fortnight of severe weather, and in March the sun was positively summer
hot. I am out of doors almost all day. Our spring, however, has made up
for the lenient winter, by being as cold and capricious as possible, and
at this moment hardly a fruit-tree is in blossom or a lilac-tree in bud;
and looking abroad over the landscape, 'tis only here and there that I
can detect faint symptoms of that exquisite green haze which generally
seems to hang like a halo over the distant woods at this season. I do
not remember so backward a spring since I have been in this country. I
do not complain of it, however, though everybody else does; for the
longer the annihilating heat of the summer keeps off, the better the
weather suits me. Will you not come over and spend the summer with me,
now that the sea voyage is only half as long as it was? Come, and we
will go to Niagara together, and you shall be half roasted alive for
full five months, an effectual warming through, I should think, for the
rest of the year. Dear Harriet, Niagara is the one thing of its kind for
which no fellow has yet been found in the world, and to see it is
certainly worth a fortnight's sea-sickness. I cannot say more in its
praise.
You speak of the sufferings of your wretched Irish population; and
because patience, fortitude, benevolence, charity, and many good fruits
spring from that bitter root, you seem to be reconciled to the fact that
ignorance and imprudence are the real causes from which the greater part
of this frightful misery proceeds.
Though God's infinite mercy has permitted that even our very errors and
sins may become, if we please, sources of virtue in, and therefore of
good to, us, do you not think that our nature, such as He has seen fit
to form it, with imperfection in its very essence, and such a transition
as death in its experience, furnishes us with a sufficient task in the
mere ceaseless government and education which it requires, without our
superadding to this difficult charge the culpability of infinite
neglect, the absolute damage and injury and all the voluntary
deterioration, sin, and sorrow which we inflict upon ourselves?
Why are we to charge God with all these things, or conceive it possible
that He ordained a state of existence in which mercy's supplication
would be that sudden death might sweep a hundred sufferings of worse
kind from the face of the earth?
God is unwearied in producing good; and we can so little frustrate His
determinate and omnipotent goodness, that out of our most desperate
follies and wickednesses the ultimate result is sure to be
preponderating good; but does this excuse the sinners and fools who
vainly attempt to thwart His purpose? or will they be permitted to say
that they are "tempted of God"? Indeed, dear Harriet, I must abide in
the conviction that we manufacture misery for ourselves which was never
appointed for us; and because Mercy, unfailing and unbounded, out of
these very miseries of our own making, draws blessed balsam for our use,
I cannot believe that it ordained and inflicted all our sufferings.
I began this letter yesterday, and am again sitting under my piazza,
with S----, in a buff coat, zigzagging like a yellow butterfly about the
lawn, and Margery mounting guard over her, with such success as you may
fancy a person taking care of a straw in a high wind likely to have....
I have just been enjoying the pleasure of a visit from one of the
members of the Sedgwick family. They are all my friends, and I do think
all and each in their peculiar way good and admirable. Catharine
Sedgwick has been prevented from coming to me by the illness of the
brother in whose family she generally spends the winter in New York....
Like most business men here, he has lived in the deplorable neglect of
every physical law of health, taking no exercise, immuring himself for
the greater part of the day in rooms or law courts where the atmosphere
was absolute poison; and using his brains with intense application,
without ever allowing himself proper or sufficient relaxation. Now, will
you tell me that Providence _intended_ that this man should so labor and
so suffer? Why, the very awfulness of the consequence forbids such a
supposition for a moment. Or will you, perhaps, say that this dire
calamity was sent upon him in order to try the fortitude, patience, and
resignation of his wife, within a month of her confinement; or of his
sister, whose nervous sensibility of temperament was of an order to have
been driven insane, had they not been mercifully relieved from the worst
results of the fatal imprudence of poor R----?
Whenever I see that human beings do act up as fully as they can to _all_
the laws of their Maker, I shall be prepared to admire misery, agony,
sickness, and all tortures of mind or body as excellent devices of the
Deity, expressly appointed for our benefit; but while I see obvious and
abundant natural causes for them in our _disobedience_ to His laws, I
shall scarce come to that conclusion, in spite of all the good which He
makes for us out of our evil. I know we must sin, but we sin more than
we _must_; and I know we must suffer, but we suffer more than we _must_
too....
God bless you, dear.
Ever affectionately yours,
F. A. B.
PHILADELPHIA, Sunday, May 27th.
MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON,
I have received within the last few days your second letter from London;
the date, however, is rather a puzzle, it being _August the 10th_,
instead (I presume) of April. I hasten, while I am yet able, to send you
word of R. S----'s rapid and almost complete recovery....
In spite of the admirable forethought which prompted the beginning of
this letter, my dear Mrs. Jameson, it is now exactly a fortnight since I
wrote the above lines; and here I am at my writing-table, in my
drawing-room, having in the interim _perpetrated_ another girl baby....
My new child was born on the same day of the month that her sister was,
and within an hour of the same time, which I think shows an orderly,
systematic, and methodical mode of proceeding in such matters, which is
creditable to me.... I should have been unhappy at the delay of my
intelligence about R. S----, but that I feel sure Catharine must ere
this have written to you herself. I am urging her might and main to come
to us and recruit a little, but, like all other very good people, she
thinks she can do something better than take care of herself; a
lamentable fallacy, for which good people in particular, and the world
in general, suffer.
As you may suppose, I do not yet indulge in the inditing of very long
epistles, and shall therefore make no apology for this, which is almost
brief enough to be witty. I am glad you like Sully, because I love him.
I am ever yours very truly,
F. A. B.
BUTLER PLACE, 1838.
MY DEAREST HARRIET,
This purposes to be an answer to a letter of yours dated the 10th of
May; the last I have received from you.... I cannot for the life of me
imagine why we envelope death in such hideous and mysterious
dreadfulness, when, for aught we can tell, being born is to an infant
quite as horrible and mysterious a process, perhaps (for we know nothing
about it) of a not much different order. The main difference lies in the
fact of our anticipation of the one event--_ma, chi sa?_--but although
some fear of death is wholesomely implanted in us, to make us shun
danger and to prevent the numbers who, without it, would impatiently
rush away from the evils of their present existence through that gate,
yet certainly one-half of the King of Terror's paraphernalia we invest
him with ourselves; since, really, being born is quite as wonderful,
and, when we consider the involuntary obligations of existence thus
thrust upon us, quite as awful a thing as dying can possibly be.
You retort upon me for having fallen from the observance of
anniversaries, that I am still a devout worshiper of places, and in this
sense, perhaps, an idolater.... My love for certain places is
inexplicable to myself. They have, for some reasons which I have not
detected, so powerfully affected my imagination, that it will
thenceforth never let them go. I retain the strongest impression of some
places where I have stayed the shortest time; thus there is a certain
spot in the hill country of Massachusetts, called Lebanon, where I once
spent two days....
I was going to tell you how like Paradise that place was to my memory,
and with what curious yearning I have longed to visit it again, but I
was interrupted; and in the intervening hours S---- has sickened of the
measles, and I am now sitting writing by her bedside, not a little
disturbed by my own cogitations, and her multitudinous questions, the
continuous stream of which is nothing slackened by an atmosphere of 91 deg.
in the shade, and the furious fever of her own attack....
As soon as S---- is sufficiently recovered, we purpose going to the
seaside to escape from the horrible heat. Our destination is a certain
beach on the shore of Long Island, called Rockaway, where there is fine
bathing, and a good six miles of hard sand for riding and driving. After
that, I believe we shall go to the hill country of Berkshire, to visit
our friends the Sedgwicks. I wonder whether your love for heat would
have made agreeable to you a six-mile ride I took to-day, at about
eleven o'clock, the thermometer standing at 94 deg. in the shade. If this is
not more _warmth_ than even you can away with, you must be "bold and
determined like any salamander, ma'am." ... My love for flowers is the
same as ever. Last winter in London I almost ruined myself in my
nosegays, and came near losing my character by them, as nobody would
believe I was so gallant to myself _out of my own pocket_. My room is
always full of them here, and in spite of recollecting (which I always
do in the very act of sticking flowers in my hair) that I am upon the
verge of _thirty_, they are still my favorite ornaments.
Thank you for your constant affection, my dear friend. It makes my heart
sink to think how much is lost to me in the distance that divides us. If
death severs forever the ties of this world, and our intercourse with
one another here is but a temporary agency, ceasing with our passage
into another stage of existence, how strong a hold have you and I laid
upon each other's souls, to be sundered at the brief limit of this
mortal life! It may possibly have accomplished its full purpose, this
dear friendship of ours, even here; but it is almost impossible to think
that its uses may not survive, or its duration extend beyond this
life;--that is an awful thought overshadowing all our earthly loves, yet
throwing us more completely upon Him, the Father, the Guardian of all;
for on him alone can we surely rest always and forever. But how much
must death change us if we can forget those who have been as dear to us
here as you and I have been to each other!
A friend of mine asked me the other day if I thought we should have
other senses hereafter, and if I could imagine any but those we now
possess: I cannot, can you? To be sure I can imagine the possession of
_common sense_, which would be a new one to me; but it is very funny,
and impossible, to try to fancy a power, like seeing or hearing, of a
different kind, though one can think of these with a higher degree of
intensity, and wider scope.... Good-bye, dearest Harriet. God bless you.
I am ever affectionately yours,
F. A. B.
PHILADELPHIA, Monday, July 23d, 1838.
It is now high-summer mark, and such a summer as we are now dying under
is scarcely remembered by the oldest human creature yet extant in these
parts. And where are you, my dear Mrs. Jameson? Sojourning in Bohemian
castles; or wandering among the ruins of old Athens? Which of your many
plans, or dreams of plans have you put into execution? I am both curious
and anxious to know something of your proceedings, and shall dispatch
this at a hazard to your brother-in-law's, where I suppose your
movements will always be known, and your whereabouts heard of.
Your book is advertised I know, and if you have adhered to your former
determination, you have withdrawn yourself from your own blaze, and
left England to profit by its light. Of myself I can tell you little
that is particularly cheerful....
The friends of good order, in this excellent city of brotherly love,
have been burning down a large new building erected for _purposes of
free discussion_, because Abolition meetings were being held in it; and
the Southern steamer has been wrecked with dreadful loss of life, owing
to the exceeding small esteem in which its officers appear to have held
that "quintessence of dust, Man." The vessel was laden with Southerners,
coming north for the summer; and I suppose there is scarcely a family
from Virginia to Florida, that is not in some way touched by this
dreadful and wanton waste of life.
Pray, when you have time, write me some word of your doing, being, and
suffering, and