pt any journal, or written anything lately.
During my winter in the South I kept a daily journal of whatever
occurred to interest me, and I am now busily engaged in copying it....
Since the perpetration of that "English Tragedy," now in your safe
keeping, I have written nothing else; and probably, until I find myself
again under the influence of some such stimulus as my mind received on
returning to England, my intellectual faculties will remain stagnant, so
far as any "worthy achievement," as Milton would say, is concerned. You
see, I persist in considering that play in that light....

I am ashamed to say that I am exceedingly sleepy. I have been riding
sixteen miles over these charming hills. The day is bright and breezy,
and full of shifting lights and shadows, playing over a landscape that
combines every variety of beauty,--valleys, in the hollows of which lie
small lakes glittering like sapphires; uplands, clothed with
grain-fields and orchards, and studded with farm-houses, each the centre
of its own free domain; hills clothed from base to brow with every
variety of forest tree; and woods, some wild, tangled, and all but
impenetrable, others clear of underbrush, shady, moss-carpeted and
sun-checkered; noble masses of granite rock, great slabs of marble (of
which there are fine quarries in the neighborhood), clear mountain
brooks and a full, free-flowing, sparkling river;--all this, under a
cloud-varied sky, such as generally canopies mountain districts, the
sunset glories of which are often magnificent. I have good friends, and
my precious children, an easy, cheerful, cultivated society, my capital
horse, and, in short, most good things that I call mine--on this side of
the water--with one heavy exception....

My dearest Harriet, my drowsiness grows upon me, so that my eyelids are
gradually drawing together as I look out at the sweet prospect, and the
blue shimmer of the little lake and sunny waving of the trees are fading
all away into a dream before me. Good-bye.

Your sleepy and affectionate
F. A. B.

[When I was in London, some time after the date of this letter, I
received an earnest request from one of the most devoted of the New
England abolitionists, to allow the journal I kept while at the
South to be published, and so give the authority of my experience to
the aid of the cause of freedom.