r, 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,

'How shall I thank thee for once more breaking the chains of
my sorrowful slumber? My heart beats. I live again, for I feel
that I am worthy audience for thee, and that my being would be
reason enough for thine.

'Master, my eyes are always clear. I see that the universe is
rich, if I am poor. I see the insignificance of my sorrows. In
my will, I am not a captive; in my intellect, not a slave. Is
it then my fault that the palsy of my affections benumbs my
whole life?

'I know that the curse is but for the time. I know what the
eternal justice promises. But on this one sphere, it is sad.
Thou didst say, thou hadst no friend but thy art. But that one
is enough. I have no art, in which to vent the swell of a soul
as deep as thine, Beethoven, and of a kindred frame. Thou wilt
not think me presumptuous in this saying, as another might.
I have always known that thou wouldst welcome and know me, as
would no other who ever lived upon the earth since its first
creation.

'Thou wouldst forgive me, master, that I have not been true to
my eventual destiny, and therefore have suffered on every side
"the pangs of despised love." Thou didst the same; but thou