Records of Later Life Part 17

PHILADELPHIA, December, 1839.

MY DEAR T----,

The expression of one's sympathy can never, whatever its sincerity, be of the value it would have possessed if uttered when first excited. In this, above all things, "they give twice who give quickly." I feel this very much in writing to you now upon the events which have lately so deeply troubled the current of your life--your good father's death, and the birth of your second baby, together with the threatened calamity from which its mother's recovery has spared you. Tardy as are these words, my sympathy has been sincerely yours during this your season of trial; and though I have done myself injustice in not sooner writing to you, believe me I have felt more for you and yours than any letter could express, though I had written it the moment the news reached me....

That your father died as full of honor as of years, that his life was a task well fulfilled, and his death not unbecoming so worthy a life, is matter of consolation to you, and all who knew and loved him less than you. I scarce know how you could have wished any other close to his career; the pang of losing such a friend you could not expect to escape, but there was hardly a circ.u.mstance (as regarded your father himself) which it seems to me you can regret. Poor M---- will be the bitterest sufferer [the lady was traveling in Europe at the time of her father's death], and for her, indeed, my compa.s.sion is great, strengthened as it is by my late experience, and constant apprehension of a similar affliction,--I mean my mother's death, and the dread of hearing, from across this terrible barrier, that I have lost my father. I pity her more than I can express; but trust that she will find strength adequate to her need.

Give my kindest love to your wife. I rejoice in her safety for your sake and that of her children, more even than for her own; for it always seems well to me with those who have gone to rest, but her loss would have been terrible for you, and her girl has yet to furnish her some work, and some compensation....

If Anne is with you, remember me very kindly to her, and

Believe me ever most truly yours, F. A. B.

[The little daughter referred to in the above letter became Mrs.

Charles Norton, one of the loveliest and most charming of young American women, s.n.a.t.c.hed by an untimely death from the midst of an adoring family and friends.]

PHILADELPHIA, Friday, December 14th, 1839.

DEAREST HARRIET,

... It is perhaps well for you that this letter has suffered an interruption here, as had this not been the case you might have been edified with a yet further "complaint." ...

We have shut up our house in the country, and are at present staying in Philadelphia, at my brother-in-law's; but we are expecting every day to start for the plantation in Georgia, where I hope we are to find what is yet lacking to us in health and strength.

I look forward with some dismay now to this expedition, in the middle of winter, with two young children, traveling by not very safe railroads and perhaps less safe steamboats, through that half-savage country, and along that coast only some months ago the scene of fearful shipwreck....

I have already written you word of our last residence there, of the small island in the Altamaha and below its level--the waters being only kept out by d.y.k.es, which protect the rice-marshes, of which the plantation is composed, from being submerged. The sole inhabitants, you know, are the negroes, who cultivate the place, and the overseer who manages them.... As early as March the heat becomes intense, and by the beginning of April it is no longer safe for white people to remain there, owing to the miasma which exhales from the rice-fields....

We shall find, no doubt, our former animal friends, from the fleas up to the alligators: the first, swarming in the filthy negroes' huts; the last, expatiating in the muddy waters of the Altamaha. I trust they will none of them have forgotten us. Did I tell you before of those charming creatures, the moccasin snakes, which, I have just been informed, abound in every part of the southern plantations? Rattlesnakes I know by sight: but the moccasin creature, though I may have seen him, I do not feel acquainted, or at any rate familiar, with. Our nearest civilized town, you know, is Savannah, and that is sixty miles off. I cannot say that the expedition is in any way charming to me, but the alternative is remaining alone here; and, as it is possible to live on the plantation with the children, I am going. Margery, of course, comes with me....

Did I tell you, my dear Irishwoman, that we had no _potatoes_ on the plantation, and that Indian meal holds the place of wheaten flour, bread baked of the latter being utterly unknown?... Do not be surprised if I dwell upon these small items of privation, even now that I am about to go among those people the amelioration of whose condition I have considered as one of my special duties. With regard to this, however, I have, alas! no longer the faintest shadow of hope....

Yours most truly, F. A. B.

PHILADELPHIA, January 15th, 1840.

DEAREST HARRIET,

My last to you was dated the fourteenth of December, and it is now the tenth of January, a whole month; and you and Dorothy are, I presume, sundered, instead of together, and surrounded with ice and snow, and all wintry influences, instead of those gentle southern ones in which you had imagined you would pa.s.s the dismal season.

I can fancy Ardgillan comfortably poetical (if that is not a contradiction in terms) at this time of year, with its warm, bright, cheerful drawing-room looking out on the gloomy sea. But perhaps you are none of you there?--perhaps you are in Dublin?--on Mr. Taylor's new estate?--or where--where, dear Harriet--where are you? How sad it seems to wander thus in thought after those we love, and conjecture of their whereabouts almost as vaguely as of the dwelling of the dead!...

I am annoyed by the interruption which all this ice and snow causes in my daily rides. My horse is rough-shod, and I persist in going out on him two or three times a week, but not without some peril, and severe inconvenience from the cold, which not only cuts my face to pieces, but chaps my skin from head to foot, through my riding-dress and all my warm under-clothing. I do not much regret our prolonged sojourn in the North, on my children's account, who, being both hearty and active creatures, thrive better in this bracing climate than in the relaxing temperature of the South....

Dear Harriet, I have nothing to tell you; my life externally is _nothing_; and who can tell the inward history of their bosom--that internal life, which is often so strangely unlike the other? Suppose I inform you that I have just come home from a ride of an hour and a half; that I went out of the city by Broad Street, and returned by Islington Lane and the Ridge Road--how much the wiser will you be? that the roads were frozen as hard as iron, and here and there so sheeted with ice that I had great difficulty in preventing my horse from slipping and falling down with me, and, being quite alone, without even a servant, I wondered what _I_ should do if _he_ did. I have a capital horse, whom I have christened Forester, after the hero of my play, and who grins with delight, like a dog, when I talk to him and pat him. He is a bright bay, with black legs and mane, tall and large, and built like a hunter, with high courage and good temper. I have had him four years, and do not like to think what would become of me if anything were to happen to him. It would be necessary that I should commit suicide, for his fellow is not to be found in "these United States." Dearest Harriet, we hope to come over to England next September; and if your sister will invite me, I will come and see you some time before I re-cross the Atlantic. I am very anxious about my father, and still more anxious about my sister, and feel heart-weary for the sight of some of my own people, places, and things; and so. Fate prospering, to speak heathen, I shall go _home_ once more in the autumn of this present 1840: till when, dearest Harriet, G.o.d bless you! and after then, and always,

I am ever your affectionate, F. A. B.

[My dear horse, having been sold to a livery-stable keeper, I repurchased him by the publication of a small volume of poems, which thus proved themselves to _me_ excellent verses. The gallant animal broke his hip-joint by slipping in a striding gallop over some wet planks, and I had to have him shot. His face--I mean the anguish in it after the accident--is among the tragical visions in my memory.]

PHILADELPHIA, February 9th, 1840.

DEAR MRS. JAMESON,

... You ask me if I have read your book on Canada. With infinite interest and pleasure, and great sympathy and admiration, and much grat.i.tude for the vindication of women's capabilities, both physical and mental, which all your books (but this perhaps more than all the others) furnish.

It has been, like all your previous works, extremely popular here; and if you have received no remuneration for it, you are not justly dealt by, as I am sure its sale has been very considerable, and very profitable. [Mrs. Jameson was, undoubtedly, one of the greatest sufferers by the want of an author's copyright in America: her works were all republished there; and her laborious literary career, her careful research and painstaking industry, together with her restricted means and the many claims upon them, made it a peculiar hardship, in her case, to be deprived of the just reward of the toil by which she gave pleasure and instruction to so many readers in America, as well as in her own country.] Your latest publication, "Social Life in Germany," I have not seen, but have read numerous extracts from it, in the American literary periodicals.

You ask me if you can "do anything" about my play? I thought I must have told you of my offering it to Macready, who civilly declined having anything to do with it. Circ.u.mstances induced me to destroy my own copy of it: the one Macready had is in Harriet's custody, another copy I have given to Elizabeth Sedgwick, and I now neither know nor care anything more about it. Once upon a time I wrote it, and that is quite enough to have had to do with it. Prescott, the historian of Ferdinand and Isabella, is urgent with me to let him have it published in Boston; perhaps hereafter, if I should want a penny, and be able to turn an honest one by so doing, I may.

It is odd that I have not the remotest recollection of reading any of that play to you. You have mentioned it several times to me, and I have never been able to recall to my mind, either when I read it to you, or what portion of it I inflicted upon you. You were lucky, and I wonder that I let you off with a _portion_ of it; for, for nearly a year after I finished it, I was in such ecstasies with my own performance, that I martyrized every soul that had a grain of regard for me, with its perusal....

J---- B---- and his brother have just started for Georgia, leaving his wife and myself in forlorn widowhood, which, (the providence of railroads and steamboats allowing) is not to last more than three months. I have been staying nearly three months in their house in town, expecting every day to depart for the plantation; but we have procrastinated to such good effect that the Chesapeake Bay is now unnavigable, being choked up with ice, and the other route involving seventy miles of night traveling _on the worst road in the United States_ (think what that means!), it has been judged expedient that the children and myself should remain behind. I am about, therefore, to return with them to the Farm, where I shall pa.s.s the remainder of the winter,--how, think you? Why, reading Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," which I have never read yet, and which I now intend to study with cla.s.sical atlas, Bayle's dictionary, the Encyclopaedia, and all sorts of "aids to beginners." How quiet I shall be! I think perhaps I may die some day, without so much as being aware of it; and if so, beg to record myself in good season, before that imperceptible event,

Yours very truly, F. A. B.

BUTLER PLACE, February 16th, 1840.

I have just been looking over a letter of yours, dearest Harriet, as old as the 19th of last September, describing your pa.s.sage over the Splugen.

About four days ago I was looking over some engravings of the pa.s.ses of the Alps, in a work called "Switzerland Ill.u.s.trated," by Bartlett, and lingered over those attempts of human art with the longing I have for those lands, which I always had, which has never died away entirely, but seems now reviving again in some of its earliest strength: I can compare it to nothing but the desire of thirst for water, and I must master it as I may, for of those mountain-streams I fear I never shall drink, or look upon their beauty, but in the study of my imagination.

In the hill-country of Berkshire, Ma.s.sachusetts, where I generally spend some part of the summer among my friends the Sedgwicks, there is a line of scenery, forming part of the Green Mountain range, which runs up into the State of Vermont, and there becomes a n.o.ble brotherhood of mountains, though in the vicinity of Stockbridge and Lenox, where I summer, but few of them deserve a more exalted t.i.tle than hill. They are clothed with a various forest of oak, beech, chestnut, maple, and fir; and down their sides run wild streams, and in the valleys between them lie exquisite lakes. Upon the whole, it is the most picturesque scenery I have ever seen; particularly in the neighborhood of a small town called Salisbury, thirty miles from Lenox. This is situated in a plain surrounded by mountains, and upon the same level in its near neighborhood lie four beautiful small lakes; close above this valley rises Mount Washington, or, as some Swiss charcoal-burners, who have emigrated thither, have christened it, Mount Rhigi.

In a recess of this mountain lies a deep ravine and waterfall; and a precipice, where an arch of rock overhangs a basin, where, many hundred feet below, the water boils in a mad cauldron, and then plunges away, by leaps of forty, twenty, and twelve feet, with the intermediate runs necessary for such jumps, through a deep chasm in the rocks, to a narrow valley, the whole character of which, I suppose, may represent Swiss scenery in _very small_.

A week ago J---- B---- and ---- left Philadelphia for the South; and yesterday I received a letter giving a most deplorable account of their progress, if progress it could be called, which consisted in going _nine miles in four hours_, and then returning to Washington, whence they had started, the road being found utterly impa.s.sable. Streams swollen with the winter snows and spring rains, with their bridges all broken up by the ice or swept away by the water, intersect these delightful ways; and one of these, which could not admit of fording, turned them back, to try their fate in a steamboat, through the ice with which the Chesapeake is blocked up. This dismal account has in some measure reconciled me to having been left behind with the children; they have neither of them been as well as usual this winter, and the season is now so far advanced, our intended departure being delayed from day to day for three months, that, besides encountering a severe and perilous journey, we should have arrived in Georgia to find the weather almost oppressively hot, and, if we did wisely, to return again, at the end of a fortnight, to the North.

I have come back to Butler Place with the bairns, and have resumed the monotonous tenor of my life, which this temporary residence in town had interrupted, not altogether agreeably; and here I shall pa.s.s the rest of the winter, teaching S---- to read, and sliding through my days in a state of external quietude, which is not always as nearly allied to content as it might seem to (_ought_ to) be....

When the children's bed-time comes, and their little feet and voices are still, the spirit of the house seems to have fallen asleep. I send my servants to bed, for n.o.body here keeps late hours (ten o'clock being considered late), and, in spite of a.s.siduous practicing, reading, and answering of letters, my evenings are sad in their absolute solitude, and I am glad when ten o'clock comes, the hour for my retiring, which I could often find in my heart to antic.i.p.ate....

I have taken vehemently to worsted-work this winter, and, _instead of a novel or two_, am going to read Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," which I have never read, and by means of Bayle, cla.s.sical atlas, and the Encyclopaedia, I mean to make a regular school-room business of it.

Good-bye, dear. Events are so lacking in my present existence, that I am longing for the spring as I never did before--for the sight of leaves and flowers, and the song of birds, and the daily development of the great natural pageant of the year. I am grateful to G.o.d for nothing more than the abundant beauty with which He has adorned His creation. The pleasure I derive from its contemplation has survived many others, and should I live long, will, I think, outlive all that I am now capable of....

Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B.

BUTLER PLACE, February 17th, 1840.

MY DEAR LADY DACRE,

... I believe too implicitly in your interest in me and mine, ever to have _nothing_ to say to you; but my sayings will be rather egotistical, for the monotony of my life affords me few interests but those which centre in my family, the head of which left me ten days ago, with his brother, for their southern estate. I have since had a letter, which, as it affords an accurate picture of winter traveling in this country, would, I flatter myself, make your sympathetic hair stand on end.

Listen. On Sunday morning, before day, they set out, two post-coaches, with four horses, each carrying eight pa.s.sengers. They got to Alexandria, which is close to Washington, whence they started without difficulty, stopped a short time to gird up their loins and take breath, and at seven o'clock set off. It rained hard; the road was deep with mud, and very bad; several times the pa.s.sengers were obliged to get out of the coach and walk through the rain and mud, the horses being unable to drag the load through such depths of mire. They floundered on, wading through mud and fording streams, until eleven o'clock, when they stopped to breakfast, having come but _eight miles_ in _four hours_. They consulted whether to go on or turn back: the majority ruled to go on; so after breakfast they again took the road, but had proceeded but one mile when it became utterly impa.s.sable--the thaw and rain had so swelled a stream that barred the way that it was too deep to ford; and when it was quite apparent that they must either turn back or be drowned, they reluctantly adopted the former course, and got back to Washington late in the evening, having pa.s.sed nearly all day in going _nine miles_. I think you will agree with me, my dear Lady Dacre, that my children and myself were well out of that party of pleasure; though the very day before the party set off it was still uncertain whether we should not accompany them.

The contrary having been determined, I am now very quietly spending the winter with my chickens at the Farm.... An imaginative nature makes, it is true, happiness as well as unhappiness for itself, but finds inevitable ready made disappointment in the mere realities of life.... I make no excuse for talking "nursery" to you, my dear Lady Dacre. These are my dearest occupations; indeed, I might say, my only ones.

Have you looked into Marryatt's books on this country? They are full of funny stories, some of them true stories enough, and some, little imitation Yankee stories of the captain's own.

Do explain to me what Sydney Smith means by disclaiming Peter Plymley's letters as he does? Surely he _did_ write them.

This very youthful nation of the United States is "carrying on," to use their own favorite phrase, in a most unprecedented manner. Their mercantile and financial experiments have been the dearest of their kind certainly; and the confusion, embarra.s.sment, and difficulty, in consequence of these experiments, are universal. Money is scarce, credit is scarcer, but, nevertheless, they will not lay the lesson to heart.

The natural resources of the country are so prodigious, its wealth so enormous, so inexhaustible, that it will be presently up and on its feet again running faster than ever to the next stumbling-post. _Moral_ bankruptcy is what they have to fear, much more than failure of material riches. It is a strange country, and a strange people; and though I have dear and good friends among them, I still feel a stranger here, and fear I shall continue to do so until I die, which G.o.d grant I may do at home!

_i.e._, in England.