valley, filled with thick, rich wood, in the centre of which a little
jewel-like lake lies gleaming. Beyond this valley the hills rise one
above another to the horizon, where they scoop the sky with a broken,
irregular outline that the eye dwells on with ever new delight as its
colors glow and vary with the ascending or descending sunlight, and all
the shadowy procession of the clouds. In one direction this undulating
line of distance is overtopped by a considerable mountain with a fine
jagged crest, and ever since early morning, troops of clouds and
wandering showers of rain and the all-prevailing sunbeams have chased
each other over the wooded slopes, and down into the dark hollow where
the lake lies sleeping, making a pageant far finer than the one Prospero
raised for Ferdinand and Miranda on his desert island....

F. A. B.

LENOX, Monday, September 3d, 1838.

It is not very long since I wrote to you, my dear Mrs. Jameson, and I
have certainly nothing of very special interest to communicate to
warrant my doing so now; but I am in your debt by letters, besides many
other things; and having leisure to back my inclination just now, I will
indite.

I am sitting "on top," as the Americans say, of the hill of Lenox,
looking out at that prospect upon which your eyes have often rested, and
making common cause in the eating and living way with Mary and Fanny
A----, who have taken up their abode here for a week [Miss Mary and
Fanny Appleton; the one afterwards married Robert, son of Sir James
Mackintosh; the other, alas! the poet Longfellow]. Never was village
hostelry so graced before, surely! There is a pretty daughter of Mr.
Dewey's staying in the house besides, with a pretty cousin; and it
strikes me that the old Red Inn is having a sort of blossoming season,
with all these sweet, handsome young faces shining about it in every
direction.

You know the sort of life that is lived here: the absence of all form,
ceremony, or inconvenient conventionality whatever. We laugh, and we
talk, sing, play, dance, and discuss; we ride, drive, walk, run,
scramble, and saunter, and amuse ourselves extremely with little
materials (as the generality of people would suppose) wherewith to do
so....

The Sedgwicks are under a cloud of sorrow just now.... They are none of
them, however, people who suffer themselves to be absorbed by their