and weaving,
like living shuttles, the woof and warp of human communication
between the continents; and the submarine telegraph shoots daily
tidings from shore to shore of that terrible Atlantic, with swift
security below its storms. But when I wrote this to my friend, no
words were carried with miraculous celerity under the dividing
waves; letters could only be received once a month, and from thirty
to thirty-seven days was the average voyage of the sailing packets
which traversed the Atlantic. Men of business went to and fro upon
their necessary affairs, but very few Americans went to Europe, and
still fewer Europeans went to America, to spend leisure, or to seek
pleasure; and American and English women made the attempt still
seldomer than the men. The distance between the two worlds, which
are now so near to each other, was then immense.]

Let me answer your questions, dear H----; though when I strive most
entirely to satisfy you, I seem to have left out the very things you
wish to know....

I am reading Sir Thomas Browne's "Religio Medici." What charming old
English it is! How many fantastical and how many beautiful things there
are in it!

Yesterday I walked down, with a basket of cucumbers and some beautiful
flowers, to Mrs. F----'s, the wife of the Unitarian clergyman whose
church I attend, and who is an excellent and highly valued friend of
mine; and I sat two hours with her and another lady, going through an
interminable discussion on the subject of intellectual gifts: the very
various proportions in which they were distributed, and the measure of
consciousness of superiority which was inevitable, and therefore
allowable, in the possessor of an unusual amount of such endowments....

I wish Mr. and Mrs. F---- lived near me instead of being merely come to
spend a few weeks in this neighborhood.... I do not keep a diary any
more; I do not find chronicling my days helps me to live them, and for
many reasons I have given up my journal. Perhaps I may resume it when we
set out for the South....

We are now altogether proprietors of this place, and I really think, as
I am often told, that it is getting to be prettier and better kept than
any other in this neighborhood. It is certainly very much improved, and
no longer looks quite unlike an English place, but there are yet a
thousand things to be done to it, in the contemplation of which I try to
forget its prese