Dear Little Trip he described that of New York as being "a despotism of the alien, by the alien, for the alien, tempered with occasional insurrections of decent folk." But to turn to important matters, I am having a bit of headstone made for Trip's 1 grave at Ponkapog. The dear little fellow he had better manners and more intelligence than half the persons you meet "on the platform of a West-End car." He wasn't constantly getting drunk and falling out of the windows of tenement houses, like Mrs. O'Flarraty; he wasn't forever stabbing somebody in North Street. Why should he be dead, and these other creatures exhausting the ozone? If he had written realistic novels and "poems" I could understand "the deep damnation of his taking off." In view of my own mature years I will not say that "they die early whom the gods love." . . No. 59 is to close its door on May 17, and we are to spend our time here and there, principally at Ponkapog, until the 13th of June, when we shall go to New York to sail on the 15th.... Mrs. T. B. is having a good time in turning our house upside down, and making it no place for a Christian to write hundred-dollar lyrics in. She insisted on having my inkstand washed, and I got divorce. a temporary I've had no word from you for ages, and now I think of it, you don't deserve so long and instructive a letter as this, and so I'll end it. Affectionately yours, 1 his dog. T. B. A. The beauty that ever is on land and sea MY Beverly, Mass., December 15, 1867 Y DEAR MISS INGELOW,- It was very kind of you to write to me, and I can hardly tell you how much pleasure your letter gave me, in my at present lonely and unsettled life. I think a woman's life is necessarily lonely, if unsettled: the home-instinct lies so deep in us. But I have never had a real home since I was a little child. I have married sisters, with whom I stay, when my work allows it, but that is not like one's own place. I want a corner exclusively mine, in which to spin my own web and ravel it again, if I wish. I wish I could learn to think my own thoughts in the thick of other people's lives, but I never could, and I am too old to begin now. However, there are compensations in all things, and I would not be out of reach of the happy children's voices, which echo round me, although they will break in upon me rather suddenly, sometimes. You asked about the sea, -our sea. The coast here is not remarkable. Just here there is a deep, sunny harbor, that sheltered the second company of the Pilgrim settlers from the Mother-Country, more than two centuries ago. A little river, which has leave to be such only at the return of the tide, half clasps the town in its crooked arm, and makes many an opening of beauty twice a day, among the fields and under the hills. The harbor is so shut in by islands, it has the effect of a lake; and the tide comes up over the wide, weedy flats, with a gentle and gradual flow. There are never any dangerous "High Tides" here. But up the shore a mile or two, the islands drift away, and the sea opens gradually as we near the storm-beaten point of Cape Ann, where we can see nothing but the waves and the ships, between us and Great Coast Flowers Britain. The granite cliffs grow higher towards the Cape, but their hollows are relieved by little thickets of intensely red wild roses, and later, by the purple twinkling asters, and the golden-rod's embodied sunshine. The east wind is bitter upon our coast. The wild rocks along the Cape are strewn with memories of shipwreck. Perhaps you remember Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus." The “Reef of Norman's Woe" is at Cape Ann, ten miles or so from here. About the same distance out, the Isles of Shoals, which there is a group of islands, are a favorite resort in the summer, and getting to be somewhat too fashionable, for their charm is the wildness which they reveal and allow. Dressed up people spoil nature, somehow; unintentionally, I suppose; but the human butterflies are better in their own parterres. At Appledore, one of the larger of these islands, I have spent many happy days with the sister of our poet Whittier, now passed to the eternal shores, and the last summer was there again, without her, alas! I missed her so, even though her noble brother was there! Perhaps that only recalled the lost, lovely days too vividly. I have seldom loved any one as I loved her. It is most pleasant These islands are full of strange gorges and caverns, haunted with stories of pirate and ghost. The old-world romance seems to have floated to them. And there I first saw your English pimpernel. It came here with the Pilgrims, I suppose, as it is not a native. to meet with these emigrant flowers. carefully tended in gardens, but some are healthily naturalized in the bleakest spots. I should so like to see the daisies Chaucer's daisies—in their native fields; and the "yellow primrose," too. Neither of these grows readily in our gardens. I have seen them only as petted houseplants. I recognize some of our wild flowers in your "Songs of Seven." By the way, Mr. Niles has sent me an illustrated copy of it, and what a gem it is! But I hardly know what are especially ours. Have you the tiny blue four-petaled "Houstonia Cœrulia"? - our first flower of spring, that and the rock-saxifrage! And is October in England gladdened with the heavenly azure of the fringed gentian? And does the climbing bitter-sweet hang its orangecolored fruit high in the deep green of the pine-trees, in the autumn? The most wonderful climber I ever saw was the trumpet-vine of the West. It grew on the banks of the Mississippi, climbing to the top of immense primeval trees, bursting out, there, into great red, clarion-like flowers. It seems literally to fix a foot in the trees as it climbs, and it has an uncivilized way of pulling the shingles off the roofs of the houses over which it is trained. I am glad that violets are common property in the world. The prairies are blue with them. How at home they used to make me feel! for they are New England blossoms too. I wonder if you like the mountains as well as you do the sea. I am afraid I do, and better, even. It seems half disloyal to say so, for I was born here; to me there is rest and strength, and aspiration and exultation, among the mountains. They are nearly a day's journey from us the White Mountains — but I will go, and get a glimpse and a breath of their glory, once a year, always. I was at Winnipiseogee, a mountain-girdled lake, in New Hampshire, when I saw your handwriting, first,—in a letter which told of your having been in Switzerland. We have no sky-cleaving Alps, there is a massiveness, a breadth, about the hill scenery here, quite unlike them, I fancy. But such cascades, such streams as rise in the hard granite, pure as liquid diamonds, and with a clear little thread of music! Argosies of Poetry I usually stop at a village on the banks of the Pemigewasset, a small silvery river that flows from the Notch Mountains, a noble pile, that hangs like a dream, and flits like one too, in the cloudy air, as you follow the stream's winding up to the Flume, which is a strange grotto, cut sharply down hundreds of feet through a mountain's heart; an immense boulder was lodged in the cleft when it was riven, half way down, and there it forever hangs, over the singing stream. The sundered rocks are dark with pines, and I never saw anything lovelier than the green light with which the grotto is flooded by the afternoon sun. But I must not go on about the mountains, or I shall never stop, I want to say something about our poets, but I will not do that, either. Beauty drifts to us from the mother-land, across the sea, in argosies of poetry. How rich we are with old England's wealth! Our own lies yet somewhat in the ore, but I think we have the genuine metal. How true it is, as you say, that we can never utter the best that is in us, poets or not. And the great true voices are so, not so much because they can speak for themselves, but because they are the voices of our common humanity. The poets are but leaders in the chorus of souls, - they utter our pæans and our misereres, and so we feel that they belong to us. It is indeed a divine gift, the power of drawing hearts upward through the magic of a song; and the anointed ones must receive their chrism with a holy humility. They receive but to give again, blessed" so. And they may also receive the gratitude of those they bless, to give it back to God. 66 more I hope you will write to me again some time, though I am afraid I ought not to expect it. I know what it is to have the day too short for the occupations which |