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.
obtained here in England.  I presume there are records still extant somewhere of all the passengers by those early ships, with their English localities annexed to their names.  Of all things, I should like to find a gravestone in one of these old churchyards with my own name upon it, although, for myself, I should wish to be buried in America.  The graves are too horribly damp here.”

The hedgerows of England, the grassy meadows, and the picturesque old cottages delighted him, and he was never tired of writing to me about them.  While wandering over the country, he was often deeply touched by meeting among the wild-flowers many of his old New England favorites,—­bluebells, crocuses, primroses, foxglove, and other flowers which are cultivated in out gardens, and which had long been familiar to him in America.

I can imagine him, in his quiet, musing way, strolling through the daisied fields on a Sunday morning and hearing the distant church-bells chiming to service.  His religion was deep and broad, but it was irksome for him to be fastened in by a pew-door, and I doubt if he often heard an English sermon.  He very rarely described himself as inside a church, but he liked to wander among the graves in the churchyards and read the epitaphs on the moss-grown slabs.  He liked better to meet and have a talk with the sexton than with the rector.

He was constantly demanding longer letters from home; and nothing gave him more pleasure than, monthly news from “The Saturday Club,” and detailed accounts of what was going forward in literature.  One of his letters dated in January, 1854, starts off thus:—­

“I wish your epistolary propensities were stronger than they are.  All your letters to me since I left America might be squeezed into one....  I send Ticknor a big cheese, which I long ago promised him, and my advice is, that he keep it in the shop, and daily, between eleven and one o’clock, distribute slices of it to your half-starved authors, together with crackers and something to drink....  I thank you for the books you send me, and more especially for Mrs. Mowatt’s Autobiography, which seems to me an admirable book.  Of all things I delight in autobiographies; and I hardly ever read one that interested me so much.  She must be a remarkable woman, and I cannot but lament my ill fortune in never having seen her on the stage or elsewhere....  I count strongly upon your promise to be with us in May.  Can’t you bring Whipple with you?”

One of his favorite resorts in Liverpool was the boarding-house of good Mrs. Blodgett, in Duke Street, a house where many Americans have found delectable quarters, after being tossed on the stormy Atlantic.  “I have never known a better woman,” Hawthorne used to say, “and her motherly kindness to me and mine I can never forget.”  Hundreds of American travellers will bear witness to the excellence of that beautiful old lady, who presided with such dignity and sweetness over her hospitable mansion.

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Yesterdays with Authors from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.