and laid waste the old Stenton
estate, and threatens the fields of Butler Place and the lovely and
beloved woods of Champlost, and will presently convert that whole
neighborhood into a mere appendage of Philadelphia, wildly driven
over by city rowdies with fast-trotting teams or mad, gigantic
daddy-long-legs-looking sulkies, and perambulated by tramps
pretending poverty and practicing theft.]

BRANCHTOWN, 1835.
DEAR MRS. JAMESON,

I have not written to you since I received a most interesting and
delightful letter of yours from Saxe-Weimar, containing an account of
your stay in Goethe's house. My answering you at all is a movement of
gratitude for your kindness in remembering me in the midst of such
surroundings, and nothing but my faith in your desire to hear something
of me would induce me to send into the world of romantic and poetic
associations you are now inhabiting, any dispatch from this most prosaic
and commonplace world of my adoption.

I think, however, it will please you to hear that I am well and happy,
and that my whole state of life and being has assumed a placid,
tranquil, serene, and even course, which, after the violent excitements
of my last few years, is both agreeable and wholesome. I should think,
ever since my coming out on the stage, I must have lived pretty much at
the rate of three years in every one--I mean in point of physical
exertion and exhaustion. The season of my repose is, however, arrived,
and it seems almost difficult to imagine that, after beginning life in
such a tumult of action and excitement, the remainder of my years is
lying stretched before me, like a level, peaceful landscape, through
which I shall saunter leisurely towards my grave. This is the pleasant
probable future: God only knows what changes and chances may sweep
across the smiling prospect, but at present, according to the
calculations of mere human foresight, none are likely to arise. As I
write these words, I _do_ bethink me of one quarter from which our
present prosperous and peaceful existence might receive a shock--the
South. The family into which I have married are large slaveholders; our
present and future fortune depend greatly upon extensive plantations in
Georgia. But the experience of every day, besides our faith in the great
justice of God, forbids dependence on the duration of the mighty abuse
by which one race of men is he