ten times better acquainted with them than I
am. But you are curious, perhaps, to learn something about her
appearance, and _that_ I can tell you.

"You will not expect to hear that Miss Bremer, a maiden lady of
forty, retains a very large share of youthful bloom; but,
independently of that, she is really any thing but handsome. Her
thin wrinkled physiognomy is, however, rendered agreeable by its
good-humoured expression, and her meagre figure has the benefit of
a neat and simple style of dress. From the style of her writings, I
used always to take her to be a governess; and she looks exactly
like one. She knows that she is not handsome, and on that account
has always refused to have her portrait taken; the one they sell of
her in Germany is a counterfeit, the offspring of an artist's
imagination, stimulated by speculative book-sellers. This summer,
there was a quizzing paragraph in one of the Swedish papers, saying
that a painter had been sent direct from America to Rome and
Stockholm, to take portraits of the Pope and of Miss Bremer.

"In Sweden, the preference is given to her romance of _Hemmet_,
(Home,) over all her other works. Any thing like a bold originality
of invention she is generally admitted to lack, but she is skilled
in throwing a poetical charm over the quiet narrow circle of
domestic life. She is almost invariably successful in her female
characters, but when she attempts to draw those of men, her
creations are mere caricatures, full of emptiness and
improbability. Her habit of indulging in a sort of aimless and
objectless philosophizing vein, _a propos_ of nothing at all, is
also found highly wearisome. For my part, it has often given me an
attack of nausea. She labours, however, diligently to improve
herself; and, when I saw her, she had just been ordering at a
bookseller's two German works--Bossen's _Translation of Homer_, and
Creuzer's _Symbolics_.

"Emily Flygare is about thirty years of age. She is the daughter of
a country clergyman, and has only to write down her own
recollections in order to depict village life, with its pains and
its pleasures. Accordingly, that is her strongest line in
authorship; and her book, _Kyrkoinvigningen_, (the Church
Festival,) has been particularly successful. Married in early life