hought her
superior to the most brilliant female members of the society of my day,
of which her daughter, Lucy Gordon, was a distinguished ornament.

Once too, years ago, I passed an evening with Lady Byron, and fell in
love with her for quoting the axiom which she does apply, though she did
not invent it--"To treat men as if they were better than they are, is
the surest way to _make_ them better than they are:"--and whenever I
think of her I remember that.

I congratulate you on your acquaintance with Madame von Goethe: to know
any one who had lived intimately with the greatest genius of this age,
and one of the greatest the world has produced, seems to me an immense
privilege.

Your letter is dated July--how many things are done that you then meant
to do?

I am just now seeing a great deal of Edward Trelawney; he traveled with
us last summer when we went to Niagara, and professing a great regard
for me, told me, upon reading your "notice" of me, that he felt much
inclined to write to you and solicit your acquaintance....

Good-bye, and God bless you; write to me when the spirit prompts you,
and believe me always

Yours very truly,
F. A. B.

[My long experience of life in America presents the ideas and
expectations with which I first entered upon it in an aspect at once
ludicrous and melancholy to me now. With all an Englishwoman's
notions of country interests, duties, and occupations; the village,
the school, the poor, one's relations with the people employed on
one's place, and one's own especial hobbies of garden, dairy, etc.,
had all been contemplated by me from a point of view which, taken
from rural life in my own country, had not the slightest resemblance
to anything in any American existence.

Butler Place--or as I then called it, "The Farm," preferring that
homely, and far more appropriate, though less distinctive
appellation, to the rather pretentious title, which neither the
extent of the property nor size and style of the house
warranted--was not then our own, and we inhabited it by the kind
allowance of an old relation to whom it belonged, in consequence of
my decided preference for a country to a town residence.

It was in no respect superior to a second-rate farm-house in
England, as Mr. Henry Berkeley told a Philadelphia friend o