5, 1841.

I PRAY you to admire my style of writing February. Began to write
July, but the truth is, I nearly lost my wits on my journey. Twelve or
thirteen mortal hours in getting to Hartford [FN: Fifty miles]. After
two or three hours, called [165] up, just when the sleep had become so
profound that on being waked I could not, for some seconds, settle it on
what hemisphere, continent, country, or spot of the creation I was,
nor why I was there at all. Then whisked away in the dark to the
science-lighted domes of New Haven, but did n't see them--for why? I was
asleep as I went through to the wharf. From the wharf, pitched into the
steamboat, not having the points of compass, nor the time of day, nor
the zenith and nadir of my own person. After two previous months of
quiet, the whirl-about made me feel very "like an ocean weed uptorn And
loose along the world of waters borne." If not a foundered weed, a very
dumfoundered one at least.

To Rev. William Ware.

SHEFFIELD, Feb. 15, 1841.

How glad I am you wrote to me, my dear W. Is n't that a queer beginning?
But there are people who say that everything natural is beautiful, and I
am sure that first line was as natural as the gushing out of a fountain;
for the very sight of your handwriting was as a sunbeam in a winter's
day. By the bye, speaking of sunbeams, they certainly do wonders in
winter weather. Have you ever seen such blue depths, or depths of blue,
in the mountains, that it seemed as if the very azure of the sky had
fallen and lodged in their clefts and leafless trees? Yesterday I was
looking towards our barn roofs covered with snow,--and you know they
are but six rods off,--and so deep was the color that I thought for
the moment it was the blue of the distant horizon. [166] Our friend
Catherine Sedgwick, writing to me a day or two ago, speaks in raptures
of it. She says it is like the haze over Soracte or Capri.

So you see my paragraph has led me from winter to summer. Summer is gone
to New York a week since. No doubt it will produce beautiful flowers in
due time, many of them culled from far distant lands, but most of them
native, I ween. Foreign seeds, you know, can do nothing without a
good soil. In truth, I am looking with great interest for Catherine
Sedgwick's book.

"Hard work to write." Yes, terribly hard it has been for me these two
years past; but when I am vigorous, I like it. However, the pen is ever,
doubtless, a manacle to the thought; draws