orsley, was prosperous and
pleasant in the highest degree; and we are now paying our promised one
at Bowood. I must tell you a trait of Anne [my children's American
nurse], who, it is my belief, is nothing less than the Princess
Pocahontas, who, having returned to earth, has condescended to take
charge of my children.

You know that this place is celebrated; the house is not only fine in
point of size, architecture, and costly furnishing, but is filled with
precious works of art, painting and sculpture, modern and ancient,
beautiful, rare, and costly. The first day that we arrived, ushered up
the great staircase to our rooms, I followed the servant with wide-open
eyes, gazing in delighted admiration at everything I saw. "Well," said I
to Anne, "is not this a fine house, Anne?" "The staircase is well
enough," was her imperturbable reply. Wouldn't one think she had had the
Vatican for her second-best house, and St. Peter's for her private
chapel, all the days of her life? She certainly must have, some Indian
blood in her veins.

This morning I took a brisk walk along the sunny terrace, where, from
under the shining shelter of holly, laurel, cedar, and all other
evergreen shrubs and trees, one looks over a garden--that even now, with
its graceful vases, its terraces, its ivy winter dressing, is gay and
beautiful--to a lawn that slopes gently to a sheet of water, losing
itself like a lake among irregular wooded banks, whose brown feathery
outline borrows from the winter's sun a golden tinge of soft sad
splendor. Upon this water swans and wild-fowl sail and sport about; and
the whole scene this morning, tipped with sparkling frost, and shining
under a brilliant sky, seemed very charming to me, and to S---- too,
who, running by my side, exclaimed, "Well, this is my idea of heaven! I
do think this might be called Paradise, or that garden--I forget its
name--that Adam and Eve were put into!" (Eden had escaped her memory,
as, let us hope, in time it did theirs.) I was pleased to find that my
Biblical teachings had suggested positive images, and that she had
caught none of her nurse's stolid insensibility to beauty....

We have a choice society here just now, and fortunately among them
persons that we know and feel at our ease with: Rogers, Moore, Macaulay,
Babbage, Westmacott, Charles Greville, and two or three charming,
agreeable, unaffected women....

You ask if Lady Holland is at Bowood. No, she had returned home _by
lan