uine gift for expression
and description, and she made an impression in contemporary letters. We
might smile now--and, in truth, we sometimes did then--over some of her
pages; but much of her work would still be called good, if resuscitated
from the dusty book-shelves of the past. I remember one passage in her
English Letters which was often quoted in our family circle as a typical
illustration of the intensity of the period: "The first tears," wrote
Grace, "that I had shed since leaving my dear native land fell fast into
the red heart of an English rose!" Nothing could be better than that;
but the volume was full of similar felicities. You were swimming in
radiant tides of enthusiastic appreciation, quotations from the poets
and poetical rhapsodies; incidents of travel, humorous, pathetic, and
graphic; swirling eddies of word-painting, of moral and ethical and
historical reflection; withal, an immense, amiable, innocent, sprawling
temperament. And as was her book, so was Grace herself; indeed, if any
one could outdo the book in personal conversation, Grace was that happy
individual. What she accomplished when she embarked, full-sailed, upon
the topic of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables may
be pictured to themselves by persons endowed with the rudiments of
imagination; I must not attempt to adorn this sober page with an
attempted reproduction of the scene. Mortal language reeled and cracked
under the strain of giving form to her admiration; but it was so honest
and well meant that it could not but give pleasure even in the midst of
bewilderment. My father bowed his head with a painful smile; but I dare
say it did him good when the ordeal was over.

At this time the reverberations of the European revolutionary year,
1848, were still breaking upon our shores. President Polk had given
mortal offence to Austria by sending over a special commissioner to
determine whether the seceding state of Hungary might be recognized as
a belligerent. In 1850 the Austrian representative, Baron Huelsmann,
had entered upon a correspondence with our own Daniel Webster. The baron
remonstrated, and Daniel mounted upon the national bird and soared in
the patriotic empyrean. The eloquence of the Secretary of State perhaps
aroused unwarranted expectations in the breasts of the struggling
revolutionists, and the Hungarian man of eloquence set out for the
United States to take the occasion by the forelock. Not since the visit
of