ernal support, and on Monday next I am going to begin
to read Latin with a master.... Any pursuit to which I am compelled will
be very welcome to me, and I have chosen that in preference to German,
as mentally more bracing, and therefore healthier.

I have already described what calls itself my garden here--three acres
of kitchen-garden, and a quarter of an acre of flower-garden, divided
into three straight strips, bordered with mangy box, and separated from
the vegetables by a white-washed paling. I am the more provoked with
this, because there are certain capabilities about the place; money is
spent in keeping it up, and three men, entitled gardeners, are
constantly at work on it; and it is not want of means, but of taste and
knowledge and care, that makes it what it is. The piece of coarse grass
dignified by the name of a lawn, in front of the house, is mowed twice
in the whole course of the summer; of course, during the interval, it
looks as if we were raising a crop of poor hay under our drawing-room
windows. However, the gardening of Heaven is making the whole earth
smile just now; and the lights and shadows of the sky, and wild flowers
and verdure of the woods are beneficently beautiful, and make my spirit
sing for joy, in spite of the little that men have done here gratefully
to improve Heaven's gifts. This is not audacious, for Adam and Eve
landscape-gardened in Paradise, you know; and I wish some little of
their craft were to be found among their descendants hereabouts.

My paper is at an end: do I tell you "nothing of my mind and soul"?
What, then, is all this that I have been writing? Is it not telling you
more than if I were to attempt to detail to you methodically,
circumstantially (and perhaps unconsciously quite falsely), the state of
either?...

I am expecting a visit from Dr. Channing, whom I love and revere. After
reading a sermon of his before going to bed the other night, I dreamt
towards morning that I was in Heaven, from whence I was literally pulled
down and awakened to get up and go to church, which, you will allow, was
a ridiculous instance of bathos and work of supererogation. But, dear
me, that dream was very pleasant! Rising, and rising, and rising, into
ever-increasing light and space, not with effort and energy, as if
flying, but calmly and steadily soaring, as if one's _property_ was to
float upwards, _mounting eternally_. I send you my dream across the
Atlantic; there is something of m