It is a sacred trust, the friendship of such a man.
MY DEAR MISS INGELOW,--It was very kind of you to write to me, and I can hardly tell you how much pleasure your letter gave me, in my at present lonely and unsettled life. I think a woman’s life is necessarily lonely, if unsettled: the home-instinct lies so deep in us. But I have never had a real home since I was a little child. I have married sisters, with whom I stay, when my work allows it, but that is not like one’s own place. I want a corner exclusively mine, in which to spin my own web and ravel it again, if I wish.
I wish I could learn to think my own thoughts in the thick of other people’s lives, but I never could, and I am too old to begin now. However, there are compensations in all things, and I would not be out of reach of the happy children’s voices, which echo round me, although they will break in upon me rather suddenly, sometimes.
You asked about the sea,--our sea. The coast here is not remarkable. Just here there is a deep, sunny harbor, that sheltered the second company of the Pilgrim settlers from the Mother-Country, more than two centuries ago. A little river, which has leave to be such only at the return of the tide, half clasps the town in its crooked arm, and makes many an opening of beauty twice a day, among the fields and under the hills. The harbor is so shut in by islands, it has the effect of a lake; and the tide comes up over the wide, weedy flats, with a gentle and gradual flow. There are never any dangerous “High Tides” here. But up the shore a mile or two, the islands drift away, and the sea opens gradually as we near the storm-beaten point of Cape Ann, where we can see nothing but the waves and the ships, between us and Great Britain. The granite cliffs grow higher towards the Cape, but their hollows are relieved by little thickets of intensely red wild roses, and later, by the purple twinkling asters and the golden-rod’s embodied sunshine.
The east wind is bitter upon our coast. The wild rocks along the Cape are strewn with memories of shipwreck. Perhaps you remember Longfellow’s “Wreck of the Hesperus.” The “Reef of Norman’s Woe” is at Cape Ann, ten miles or so from here. About the same distance out, there is a group of islands,--the Isles of Shoals, which are a favorite resort in the summer, and getting to be somewhat too fashionable, for their charm is the wildness which they reveal and allow. Dressed up people spoil nature, somehow; unintentionally, I suppose; but the human butterflies are better in their own _parterres_. At Appledore, one of the larger of these islands, I have spent many happy days with the sister of our poet Whittier, now passed to the eternal shores,--and the last summer was there again, without her, alas! I missed her so, even though her noble brother was there! Perhaps that only recalled the lost, lovely days too vividly. I have seldom loved any one as I loved her.