relations, and I might not be able to be calm and chip marble with you any more, if I talked to you in magnetism and music; so I sealed and sent it in the due direction.

’I remember you say, that forlorn seasons often turn out the most profitable.  Perhaps I shall find it so.  I have been reading Plato all the week, because I could not write.  I hoped to be tuned up thereby.  I perceive, with gladness, a keener insight in myself, day by day; yet, after all, could not make a good statement this morning on the subject of beauty.’

She had, indeed, a rude strength, which, if it could have been supported by an equal health, would have given her the efficiency of the strongest men.  As it was, she had great power of work.  The account of her reading in Groton is at a rate like Gibbon’s, and, later, that of her writing, considered with the fact that writing was not grateful to her, is incredible.  She often proposed to her friends, in the progress of intimacy, to write every day.  ’I think less than a daily offering of thought and feeling would not content me, so much seems to pass unspoken.’  In Italy, she tells Madame Arconati, that she has ‘more than a hundred correspondents;’ and it was her habit there to devote one day of every week to those distant friends.  The facility with which she assumed stints of literary labor, which veteran feeders of the press would shrink from,—­assumed and performed,—­when her friends were to be served, I have often observed with wonder, and with fear, when I considered the near extremes of ill-health, and the manner in which her life heaped itself in high and happy moments, which were avenged by lassitude and pain.

    ‘As each task comes,’ she said, ’I borrow a readiness from its
    aspect, as I always do brightness from the face of a friend. 
    Yet, as soon as the hour is past, I sink.’

I think most of her friends will remember to have felt, at one time or another, some uneasiness, as if this athletic soul craved a larger atmosphere than it found; as if she were ill-timed and mis-mated, and felt in herself a tide of life, which compared with the slow circulation of others as a torrent with a rill.  She found no full expression of it but in music.  Beethoven’s Symphony was the only right thing the city of the Puritans had for her.  Those to whom music has a representative value, affording them a stricter copy of their inward life than any other of the expressive arts, will, perhaps, enter into the spirit which dictated the following letter to her patron saint, on her return, one evening, from the Boston Academy of Music.

TO BEETHOVEN.

    ’Saturday Evening. 25th Nov., 1843.

    ’My only friend,