ing does not stand coaxing and beckoning
the shy summer to the woods and fields as in our country, but while
winter yet seems lord of the ascendant, and his white robes are
still covering land and water, suddenly the summer looks down upon
the earth from the cloudless sky, and, as by magic, the ice melts,
the snow evaporates, the trees are clothed with green, the woods
are full of flowers, and the whole world breaks out into a
hallelujah of warmth, beauty, and blossoming like mid-July in our
deliberate climate. This again lasts, as it were, but a day; the
sun presently becomes so powerful that the world withers away under
the intense heat, the flowers and shrubs fade, and instead of
screening and refreshing the earth, are themselves scorched and
parched with the glaring fierceness of the sky; the ground cracks,
the watercourses dry up, the rivers shrink in their beds, and every
human creature that can flies from the lowlands and the cities to
go up into the north or to the mountains to find breath, shelter,
and refreshment from the sultry curse. Then comes the autumn, and
that is most glorious; not soft and sad as ours, but to the very
threshold of winter bright, warm, lovely, and gorgeous. Two seasons
remain to our earthly year, remembrances, I think, of Paradise; the
spring in Italy, and autumn in America....

You ask me how I "fit in" to my American audiences? Why, very
kindly indeed. At first they seemed to me rather cold, and I felt
this more with regard to my father than myself, but I think they
have grown to like us; I certainly have grown to like them, and
their applause satisfies me amply.... I heard yesterday of one of
Sir Thomas Lawrence's prints of me which was carried by a peddler
beyond the Alleghany Mountains [the Alleghany Mountains then were
further than the Rocky Mountains are now from the Atlantic
seaboard], and bought at an egregious price by a young engineer,
who with fifteen others went out there upon some railroad
construction business, were bidding for it at auction in that
wilderness, where they themselves were gazed at, as prodigies of
strange civilization, by the half-savage inhabitants of the region.
That touched and pleased me very much.... We are going to act here
till the 12th of this month, when we go to Boston, where