--No more. SOPHIA.
CHAPTER VI
LENOX
One of the authors in that excellent company congregated at this
period in this part of Berkshire--Mr. Mansfield--writes to Mrs.
Hawthorne for the pleasure of the thing; and one fairly hears the
drone of time as the days hang ripe and sleepy upon his hands. I quote
a few paragraphs from his letters:--
HOME, January 15, 1851.
DEAR MADAM,--It was very kind in you to take up my affairs, and I will
say here upon the margin of this reply, that I SHOULD have very much
liked your opinion of the "Pundison Letters" I sent out; but now--so
long ago is it--I have had time to let my whimsical nature find some
other occupation; and the "Up-Country Letters" may lie as they are,
not unlikely for the next thousand years. I am absorbed and busied
with Bishop Butler's Analogy, which is all things to me at this
present; and I am not sure that "The House of the Seven Gables" could
tempt me away from it until I get my fill. . . . The Bishop is great,
and I hope to have him with me until the frost comes out of the
ground, and I can busy myself with Nature herself.
I laughed the other day loud and long at a report of the plot of "The
House of the Seven Gables," in a letter to a lady. . . . The remark
was, that "the plot of 'The House of the Seven Gables' was--deepening
damnably." . . . You speak of "the crimson and violet sunrises, and
the green and gold sunsets," etc.; and I am glad to get so good an
authority for the fact of mixed colors in sunrising.
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