ssuring her with friendly and
comfortable words, and thanking her (yet with a smile of gentle humor
in his eyes at the thought of certain mistaken speculations) for having
interpreted him to mankind so well.

I believe that it has been the fate of this remarkable book never to
have had more than a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it only
in insulated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. But, since my
return to America, a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured
me that he has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is
completely a convert to its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, and
not to me,--whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her,
she declared unworthy to meddle with her work,--it belongs surely to
this one individual, who has done her so much justice as to know what
she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in her due position before the public and
posterity.

This has been too sad a story. To lighten the recollection of it, I will
think of my stroll homeward past Charlecote Park, where I beheld the
most stately elms, singly, in clumps, and in groves, scattered all about
in the sunniest, shadiest, sleepiest fashion; so that I could not but
believe in a lengthened, loitering, drowsy enjoyment which these trees
must have in their existence. Diffused over slow-paced centuries,
it need not be keen nor bubble into thrills and ecstasies, like the
momentary delights of short-lived human beings. They were civilized
trees, known to man and befriended by him for ages past. There is an
indescribable difference--as I believe I have heretofore endeavored to
express--between the tamed, but by no means effete (on the contrary,
the richer and more luxuriant) Nature of England, and the rude, shaggy,
barbarous Nature which offers us its racier companionship in America. No
less a change has been wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit
what the English call their forests. By-and-by, among those refined and
venerable trees, I saw a large herd of deer, mostly reclining, but
some standing in picturesque groups, while the stags threw their large
antlers aloft, as if they had been taught to make themselves tributary
to the scenic effect. Some were running fleetly about, vanishing from
light into shadow and glancing forth again, with here and there a little
fawn careering at its mother's heels. These deer are almost in the same
relation to the wild, natural state of their kind that