He has
mended it. On one of the secretaries stands the lovely Ceres, and
opposite it Margaret Fuller's bronze vase. In the afternoon, when the
sun fills the room and lights up the pictures, it is beautiful. Yet
still more, perhaps, in the evening, when the astral enacts the sun,
and pours shine upon all the objects, and shows, beneath, the noblest
head in Christendom, in the ancient chair with its sculptured back [a
chair said to have come over in the Mayflower, and owned by the
Hawthorne family]; and whenever I look up, two stars beneath a brow of
serene white radiate love and sympathy upon me. Can you think of a
happier life, with its rich intellectual feasts? That downy bloom of
happiness, which unfaithful and ignoble poets have persisted in
declaring always vanished at the touch and wear of life, is delicate
and fresh as ever, and must remain so if we remain unprofane. The
sacredness, the loftiness, the ethereal delicacy of such a soul as my
husband's will keep heaven about us. My thought does not yet compass
him. December. For the world's eye I care nothing; but in the
profound shelter of this home I would put on daily a velvet robe, and
pearls in my hair, to gratify my husband's taste. This is a true
wife's world. Directly after dinner my lord went to the Athenaeum; and
when he returned, he sat reading Horace Walpole till he went out to
the wood-house to saw and split wood. Presently I saw, hastening up
the avenue, Mr. George Bradford.
Pages:
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77