Yesterdays with Authors eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 572 pages of information about Yesterdays with Authors.

Yesterdays with Authors eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 572 pages of information about Yesterdays with Authors.
with the greatest interest is the Life of Dr. Channing, and I can hardly tell you the glow of gratification with which I found my own name mentioned, as one of the writers in whose works that great man had taken pleasure.  The approbation of Dr. Channing is something worth toiling for.  I know no individual suffrage that could have given me more delight.  Besides this selfish pleasure and the intense interest with which I followed that admirable thinker through the whole course of his pure and blameless life, I have derived another and a different satisfaction from that work,—­I mean from its reception in England.  I know nothing that shows a greater improvement in liberality in the least liberal part of the English public, a greater sweeping away of prejudice whether national or sectarian, than the manner in which even the High Church and Tory party have spoken of Dr. Channing.  They really seem to cast aside their usual intolerance in his case, and to look upon a Unitarian with feelings of Christian fellowship.  God grant that this spirit may continue!  Is American literature rich in native biography?  Just have the goodness to mention to me any lives of Americans, whether illustrious or not, that are graphic, minute, and outspoken.  I delight in French memoirs and English lives, especially such as are either autobiography or made out by diaries and letters; and America, a young country with manners as picturesque and unhackneyed as the scenery, ought to be full of such works.  We have had two volumes lately that will interest your countrymen:  Mr. Milnes’s Life of John Keats, that wonderful youth whose early death was, I think, the greatest loss that English poetry ever experienced.  Some of the letters are very striking as developments on character, and the richness of diction in the poetical fragments is exquisite.  Mrs. Browning is still at Florence with her husband.  She sees more Americans than English.

    Books here are sadly depreciated.  Mr. Dyce’s admirable edition of
    Beaumont and Fletcher, brought out two years ago at L6 12_s._ is now
    offered at L2 17_s._

    Adieu, dear Mr. Fields; forgive my seeming neglect, and believe me
    always most faithfully yours,

    M.R.  MITFORD.

    (No date, 1849.)

Dear Mr. Fields:  I cannot tell you how vexed I am at this mistake about letters, which must have made you think me careless of your correspondence and ungrateful for your kindness.  The same thing has happened to me before, I may say often, with American letters,—­with Professor Norton, Mrs. Sigourney, the Sedgwicks,—­in short I always feel an insecurity in writing to America which I never experience in corresponding with friends on the Continent; France, Germany, Italy, even Poland and Russia, are comparatively certain.  Whether it be the agents in London who lose letters, or some fault in the post-office, I cannot tell, but I have twenty times experienced the vexation,
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Yesterdays with Authors from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.