d utter
solitude, and a strange dream of the past, filling the haunts where
human life, its sin and sorrow, and joy and hope, and love and
hate, had breathed and palpitated, and were now forever gone. The
notion of that desert once, but now deserted, paradise, whose
flowers had looked up at Miranda, whose skies had shed wisdom on
Prospero, always seems to me full of melancholy. The girl's sweet
voice singing no more in the sunny, still noon, the grave, tender
converse of the father and child charming no more the solemn
eventide, the forsaken island dwells in my imagination as at once
desecrated and hallowed by its mortal sojourners; no longer savage
quite, and never to be civilized; the supernatural element
disturbed, the human element withdrawn; a sad, beautiful place,
stranger than any other in the world. Perhaps the sea went over it;
it has never been found since Shakespeare landed on it. I love that
poem beyond words....

I shall ruin you in postage; if there is any chance of that, keep
Mrs. Norton's five guineas to pay for my American epistles.

Ever your affectionate
F. A. K.

DEAREST H----,

I have received your letter, acknowledging my first to you.... As
for letters, they are like everything else we experience here,
sources of to the full as much suffering as satisfaction. Who has
not felt their whole blood run backward at sight of one of these
folded fate-bearers? I declare, breaking an envelope always has
something of the character of pulling a shower-bath string over
one's own head; I wonder anybody ever has the courage to do it....

Your dread of our finding New York quite a desert would have been
literally fulfilled had we reached it a fortnight sooner; but the
dreadful malady, the cholera, had taken its departure, and though
private bereavements and general stagnation of business rendered
the season a very unfavorable one for our experiment, yet, upon the
whole, we have every reason to be well satisfied with the result of
it, and think we did well not to postpone the beginning of our
campaign.... The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me
like the breaking asunder of some curious, beautiful, and mystical
pattern or device.... All