(Began April 4th.) Mandarin, Florida, May 11, 1872.
My dear friend,--I was very glad to get your dear little note,--sorry to see by it that you are not in your full physical force.
Owing to the awkwardness and misunderstanding of publishers, I am not reading “Middlemarch,” as I expected to be, here in these orange shades: they don't send it, and I am too far out of the world to get it. I felt, when I read your letters, how glad I should be to have you here in our Florida cottage, in the wholly new, wild, woodland life.
Though resembling Italy in climate, it is wholly different in the appearance of nature,--the plants, the birds, the animals, all different.
The green tidiness and culture of England here gives way to a wild and rugged savageness of beauty.
Every tree bursts forth with flowers; wild vines and creepers execute delirious gambols, and weave and interweave in interminable labyrinths.
Yet here, in the great sandy plains back of our house, there is a constant wondering sense of beauty in the wild, wonderful growths of nature.
First of all, the pines — high as the stone pines of Italywith long leaves, eighteen inches long, through which there is a constant dreamy sound, as if of dashing waters.
Then the live-oaks and the water-oaks, narrow-leaved evergreens, which grow to enormous size, and whose branches are draped with long festoons of the gray moss.
There is a great, wild park of these trees back of us, which, with the dazzling, varnished green of the new spring leaves and the swaying drapery of moss, looks like a sort of enchanted grotto.
Underneath grow up hollies and ornamental flowering
