Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall, Ed.

To the same.

I can't talk about books, nor anything else, until 1 tell you the good news; that I leave Norridgewock, and take a school in Gardiner, as soon as the travelling is tolerable. When I go to Gardiner, remember to write often, for “'t is woman alone who truly feels what it is to be a stranger.” Did you know that last month I entered my nineteenth year?

I hope, my dear brother, that you feel as happy as I do. Not that I have formed any high-flown expectations. All I expect is, that, if I am industrious and prudent I shall be independent. I love to feel like Malcolm Graeme when he says to Allan Bane,

Tell Roderick Dhu I owe him naught.

Have you seen “Ivanhoe” ? The “Shakespeare of novelists” has struck out a new path for his versatile and daring genius, I understand. Does he walk [6] with such elastic and lofty tread as when upon his own mountain heath? Have his wings expanded since he left the hills of Cheviot? Or was the torch of fancy, lighted with the electric spark of genius, extinguished in the waters of the Tweed? I have never seen it. Indeed “I have na ony speerings” about the literary world, except through the medium of the newspapers. I am sorry to see the favored son of genius handled with such unmerciful, though perhaps deserved, severity in the review of “Don Juan.” “Lalla Rookh” is the last I have seen from the pen of “Imagination's Charter'd Libertine.” I hope we shall have another collection of gems as splendid, and more pure, than his former collections.