Chapter XXI · (continued 6)

I think my father has some idea of bringing out "The Star of Seville" here, and if he does I shall break my heart that it was not brought out first in England. Emily always reproaches me with want of patriotism. I have more than helps to make me cheerful here, and leaving England—not home, and not you, but England, England—for two years, seems to me now ridiculous, and fabulous, and preposterous, and disastrous.

I have finished my first volume of Graham, and I have finished this letter. God bless you!

Ever your affectionate

F. A. K.

Philadelphia, November 2, 1832.

Dearest H——,

I received your fifth letter to-day, and one from Dorothy, and one from Emily Fitzhugh.... My last letter to you was a sad one, and sad in a fashion that does not often occur to me. I was troubled and anxious about my professional labor and its results, and that may be called a small sadness compared with some other with which I have lately become familiar. Of course none of these anxieties have been removed, for some time must elapse before I can know on what plan my father determines with regard to Mr. Bartley's proposal about this new theater. It does not affect me personally, because I am thoroughly determined to take no part in any speculation of the kind; but the possibility of my father entering into any such scheme is care enough to "kill a cat," and make a kitten miserable besides.... In all matters, but especially in matters of business, I hold frankness, straightforwardness, and decision as conducive to success, as consonant with right feeling; but I think men are much more cowardly than women, and believe a great deal more in policy, temporizing, and expediency than we do. "Managing" is supposed to be a feminine tendency; it has no place in my composition; perhaps I might be the better for a little of it—but only perhaps, and only a little.... This letter, as you will perceive by its date, was begun on the banks of the Delaware; here we are, however, once more in New York. It is Monday evening, the 5th of November, and you are firing squibs and burning manikins en action de grâces that the Houses of Parliament were not blown up by the Roman Catholics, instead of living to be reformed by the Whigs, and (peradventure) blowing up the nation.

The Presidential Election is going on here, and creates immense excitement. General Jackson, they say, will certainly be re-elected.

Our last fortnight in Philadelphia has been one of incessant and very hard work, rehearsing every morning and acting every night. I rejoiced heartily when our engagement drew to a close, for I was fairly worn out, and money bought with health is bought too dear, I think.... I have taken some very pleasant rides during our stay in Philadelphia; the horses are none of them properly broken for riding, which makes it a pleasure of no small fatigue to ride them for three or four hours. Luckily, I do not object to severe exercise, and the weather and the country were both charming....

I am glad you have been re-reading the "Tempest." ... What exquisite pleasure that fine creation has given me! I like it better than any of the other plays; it is less "of the earth, earthy" than any of the others; for though the "Midsummer Night's Dream" is in some sort, as it were, its companion, the mortal element in the latter poem is far less noble and lovely than in the "Tempest." Prospero and Miranda, the dwellers on the enchanted island, are statelier and fairer than any of the human wanderers in the mazes of the Athenian wood. There is a deep and indescribable melancholy to me in the "Tempest" that mingles throughout with its beauty, and lends a special charm to it. I so often contemplate in fancy that island, lost in the unknown seas, just in the hour of its renewed solitude, after the departure of its "human mortal" dwellers and visitors, when Prospero and his companions had bade farewell to it, when Caliban was grunting and grubbing and groveling in his favorite cave again, when Ariel was hovering like a humming-bird over the flower draperies of the woods, where the footprints of men were still stamped on the wet sand of the shining shore, but their voices silent and their forms vanished, and utter solitude, and a strange dream of the past, filling the haunts where human life, its sin and sorrow, and joy and hope, and love and hate, had breathed and palpitated, and were now forever gone. The notion of that desert once, but now deserted, paradise, whose flowers had looked up at Miranda, whose skies had shed wisdom on Prospero, always seems to me full of melancholy. The girl's sweet voice singing no more in the sunny, still noon, the grave, tender converse of the father and child charming no more the solemn eventide, the forsaken island dwells in my imagination as at once desecrated and hallowed by its mortal sojourners; no longer savage quite, and never to be civilized; the supernatural element disturbed, the human element withdrawn; a sad, beautiful place, stranger than any other in the world. Perhaps the sea went over it; it has never been found since Shakespeare landed on it. I love that poem beyond words....

I shall ruin you in postage; if there is any chance of that, keep Mrs. Norton's five guineas to pay for my American epistles.

Ever your affectionate

F. A. K.

Dearest H——,

I have received your letter, acknowledging my first to you.... As for letters, they are like everything else we experience here, sources of to the full as much suffering as satisfaction. Who has not felt their whole blood run backward at sight of one of these folded fate-bearers? I declare, breaking an envelope always has something of the character of pulling a shower-bath string over one's own head; I wonder anybody ever has the courage to do it....

Your dread of our finding New York quite a desert would have been literally fulfilled had we reached it a fortnight sooner; but the dreadful malady, the cholera, had taken its departure, and though private bereavements and general stagnation of business rendered the season a very unfavorable one for our experiment, yet, upon the whole, we have every reason to be well satisfied with the result of it, and think we did well not to postpone the beginning of our campaign.... The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me like the breaking asunder of some curious, beautiful, and mystical pattern or device.... All our lives long we are more or less intent on replacing the bright scattered fragments in their original shape: most of us die with the bits still scattered round us—that is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or soiled and defaced beyond recognition, in the life-process. The few very wise find and place them in a coherent form at last, but it is quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern from the original one.

The deaths of the young Napoleon, the Duke of Reichstadt, and Walter Scott have excited universal interest here, naturally of a very dissimilar kind. One's heart burns to think of that young eagle falling like a weakly winter flower, or a faded, sickly girl, into his untimely grave.... There was nothing for him but death. If he had been anything, it could only have been a wild spark of the mad meteor from which he sprang; and as Heaven in its wisdom forbade that, I think it much of its mercy that it extinguished him early and utterly, and did not leave him to flare and flicker and burn himself out with foul gunpowder smoke, and smell of dead men slain in battle, in the middle of the smoldering ashes of his father's European empire.

My admiration and respect for Walter Scott are unbounded, and were I the noblest, richest, and charmingest man in the world, I would lay myself at Anne Scott's feet out of sheer love and veneration for her father....

You ask me if I wrote anything on board ship? Nothing but odds and ends of doggerel. Since I have been here I have written some verses on the beautiful American autumn, which have been published with commendation. I am thinking of writing a prose story, if ever again I can get two minutes and a half of leisure.... Your entreaties for minute details of our life make me sad, for how little of what we do, be, or suffer can be conveyed to you in this miserable scrap of paper!... Our dinner-hour is three when we are actors, five when we are ladies and gentlemen. The food we get here in New York is very indifferent. It was excellent in quality in Philadelphia, but wherever we have been there is a want of niceness and refinement in the cooking and serving everything that is very disagreeable....

Thursday, Nov. 27th. This is my birthday—in England always one of the gloomiest days of this gloomy month; here my windows are all open, and the warm sun streaming in as it might on the finest of early September days with us. I am to-day three-and-twenty. Where is my life gone to? As the child said, "Where does the light go when the candle is out?" ... Since last I wrote to you I have been forty miles up the Hudson, and seen such noble waters and beautiful hills, such glory of color and magnificent breadth in the grand river and its autumn woods, as I cannot describe.

This is our last night but one of acting here. We play "The Hunchback" on Saturday, and on Monday go back to Philadelphia for three weeks; thence to Baltimore and Washington, and then return here. I must go now and rehearse Katharine and Petruchio.

I have just finished Graham's "History," and am beginning John Smith. By the by, a gentleman here is writing a play, in which I am to act Pocahontas and my father Captain Smith. Come out and see it, won't you? Good-by, dear. Think always of your affectionate

F. A. K.

December 9, 1832.

My dearest H——,

I received yours of October 16th yesterday.... You are not healthily natured enough to be inconstant. Yours is one of those morbid organizations for whom the present never does its wholesome, proper office of superseding the past, and your thoughts and feelings, your whole inner life, in short, is always out of perspective, because your background is forever your foreground, and with you, half the time, nothing is but what is not; not in consequence of looking forward, like Macbeth, but the reverse.... I am delighted that you are going to Scotland to know my dear Mrs. Harry Siddons.

Before this letter reaches you, however, you will have returned to your castle, and your visit to Edinburgh will be over.... Mercy on me! what disputations you and Mr. Combe will have had—on matters physiological, psychological, phrenological, and philosophical! My brains ache to imagine them.... Spurzheim, you know, is dead lately in Boston. It is a matter of regret to me not to have seen him, and his death will be a grief to the Combes, who venerate him highly.... Making trial of people is running a foolish risk, and they who get disappointment by it reap the most probable result from such experiments. I am quite willing to trust my friends; God forbid I should ever try them!...

We have not yet been to Boston, and therefore I myself know nothing of Channing, and cannot answer your questions about him. All that I hear inclines me to like as well as respect him. His gentleness and kindness, his weak health, brought on by over-study, his perfect simplicity and unaffectedness—these are the usual details that follow any mention of him, and accord with the impression his writings produced upon me; but of his theological treatises I know nothing.

I am glad anything so universal as the blessed sunshine reminds you of me, because my remembrance must be present with you almost daily. The lights of heaven shine more glowingly here than through the misty veils that curtain our islands. The moon and stars are wonderfully bright, and there is an intensity, an earnestness, and a translucent purity in the sky here that delights me.... Four months are already gone out of the two years we are to pass out of England. Dear England! My heart dwells with affectionate pride upon the beauty and greatness and goodness of my own country—that wonderful little land, that mere morsel of earth as it seems on the map—so full of power, of wealth, of intellectual vigor and moral worth!...

I found Graham a little too much of a Republican for me, though his "History" seemed to me upon the whole good and very impartial. I am now half way through Smith's "Virginia," which pleases me by its quaint old-world style. I am myself much inclined to be in love with Captain Smith. A man who fights three Turks and carries their heads on his shield is to me an admirable man....

I answer the propositions in your letters in regular rotation as they come; and so, with regard to the peaches, those that I have tasted on this side of the Atlantic I should say were not comparable to fine hothouse peaches in England and fine French espalier peaches; but then the peach trees here are standard trees, and there are whole orchards of them. Their chief merit, therefore, is their abundance, and some of that abundance is certainly fit for nothing but to feed pigs withal. [It is by no means a luxury to be despised, however, to have, in the American fashion, on a hot summer's day, a deep plate presented to you full of peaches, cut up like apples for a pie, that have been standing in ice, and are then snowed over with sugar and frozen cream.]

We are now in Philadelphia, whence we go to Baltimore, Washington, and Charleston. The Southern States are at this moment in a state of violent excitement, which seems almost to threaten a dissolution of the Union. The tariff question is the point of disagreement; and as the interests of the North and South are in direct opposition on this subject, there is no foretelling the end.

Our success is very great, and we have every reason to be satisfied with and grateful for it. Our houses are full, and eke our pockets, and we have hitherto managed to live in tolerable privacy and very tolerable discomfort. But I believe the western part of the country has yet to teach us the extent of inconvenience to which travelers in America are sometimes liable. God bless you, dearest H——.

I am, ever yours affectionately,

F. A. K.

My father and I took a moonlight walk the other night, from ten o'clock till half-past twelve, during which we neither of us uttered six words.

Baltimore, January 2, 1833.

My dearest H——,

You are the first to whom I date this new year.... I told you in one of my letters to keep the five guineas Mrs. Norton has paid you for my scribblements to pay the postage of my letters—do so....

We arrived in this place on Monday, at half-past four, having left Philadelphia at six in the morning. We have just terminated a second engagement there very successfully. If the roads and carriages are bad, and the land-traveling altogether detestable, the speed, facility, and convenience of the steamboats, by which one may really be conveyed from one end to another of this world of vast waters, are very admirable. Vast waters indeed they are! We came down the Delaware on Monday, and (open your Irish eyes!) sometimes it was six, sometimes thirteen miles wide, and never narrower than three or four miles at any part of it that we saw. So wide an expanse of fresh running water is in itself a fine object. We crossed the narrow neck of land between the Delaware and the Chesapeake on a railroad with one of Stephenson's engines....

The railroad was full of knots and dots, and jolting and jumping and bumping and thumping places. The carriages we were in held twelve people very uncomfortably. Baltimore itself, as far as I have seen it, strikes me as a large, rambling, red-brick village on the outskirts of one of our manufacturing towns, Birmingham or Manchester. It covers an immense extent of ground, but there are great gaps and vacancies in the middle of the streets, patches of gravely ground, parcels of meadow land, and large vacant spaces—which will all, no doubt, be covered with buildings in good time, for it is growing daily and hourly—but which at present give it an untidy, unfinished, straggling appearance.

While my father and I were exploring about together yesterday, we came to a print-shop, whose window exhibited an engraving of Reynolds's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, and Lawrence's picture of my uncle John in Hamlet. We stopped before them, and my father looked with a good deal of emotion at these beautiful representations of his beautiful kindred, and it was a sort of sad surprise to meet them in this other world where we are wandering, aliens and strangers.

This is the newest-looking place we have yet visited, the youngest in appearance in this young world; and I have experienced to-day a disagreeable instance of its immature civilization, or at any rate its small proficiency in the elegancies of life. I wanted to ride, but although a horse was to be found, no such thing as a side-saddle could be procured at any livery-stable or saddler's in the town, so I have been obliged to give up my projected exercise.

I have been to my first rehearsal here this morning, and wretched enough all things were. I act for the first time to-morrow night Bianca, which they have everywhere chosen for my opening part; and it is a good one for that purpose, as I generally act and look well in it, and it is the sort of play that all sorts of people can comprehend. There is a foreign—I mean continental—custom here, which is pleasant. They have a table d'hôte dinner at two o'clock, and while it is going on a very tolerable band plays all manner of Italian airs and German waltzes, and as there is a fine long corridor into which my room-door opens, with a window at each end, I have a very agreeable promenade, and take my exercise to this musical accompaniment....

I have at this moment on my table a lovely nosegay—roses, geraniums, rare heaths, and perfect white camellias. Our windows are all wide open; the heat is intense, and the air that comes in at them like a sirocco. It is unusual weather for the season even here, and very unwholesome.

In a week's time we are going on to Washington, where we shall find dear Washington Irving, whom I think I shall embrace, for England's sake as well as his own. We have letters to the President, to whom we are to be presented, and to his rival, Henry Clay, and to Daniel Webster, whom I care more to know than either of the others.

After a short stay in Washington we return here, and then back to Philadelphia and New York, till the 20th of February, after which we sail for Charleston. There has been, and still exists at present, a very considerable degree of political alarm and excitement in this country, owing to the threat of the South Carolinians to secede from the Union if the tariff is not annulled, and the country is in hourly expectation of being involved in a civil war. However, the prevailing opinion among the wise seems to be that the Northern States will be obliged to give up the tariff, as the only means of preserving the Union; and if matters come to a peaceable settlement, we shall proceed in February to Charleston; if not, South Carolina will have other things to think of besides plays and play-actors. The summer we shall probably spend in Canada; the winter perhaps in Jamaica, to which place we have received a most pressing invitation from Lord Mulgrave. The end of the ensuing spring will, I trust in God, see us embarked once more for England....

We are earning money very fast, and though I think we work too incessantly and too hard, yet, as every night we do not act is a certain loss of so much out of my father's pocket, I do not like to make many objections to it, although I think it is really not unlikely to be detrimental to his own health and strength....

I spent yesterday evening with some very pleasant people here, who are like old-fashioned English folk, the Catons, Lady Wellesley's father and mother. They are just now in deep mourning for Mrs. Caton's father, the venerable Mr. Carroll, who was upward of ninety-five years old when he died, and was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. I saw a lovely picture by Lawrence of the eldest of the three beautiful sisters, the daughters of Mrs. Caton, who have all married Englishmen of rank. [The Marchioness of Wellesley, the Duchess of Leeds, and Lady Stafford. The fashion of marrying in England seems to be traditional in this family. Miss McTavish, niece of these ladies, married Mr. Charles Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle.]

The Baltimore women are celebrated for their beauty, and I think they are the prettiest creatures I have ever seen as far as their faces go; but they are short and thin, and have no figures at all, either in height or breadth, and pinch their waists and feet most cruelly, which certainly, considering how small they are by nature, is a work of supererogation, and does not tend to produce in them a state of grace.... We act every night this week, and as we are obliged to rehearse every morning, of course I have no time for any occupations but my strictly professional ones. I do not approve of this quantity of hard work for either my father or myself, but I do not like to make any further protest upon the subject....

Good-by, dearest H——.

I am ever your affectionate

F. A. K.

To Mrs. Jameson.

Baltimore, January 11, 1833.

Thank you across the sea, dear Mrs. Jameson, for your letter of the 1st of November. I had been wondering, but the day before it reached me, whether you had ever received one I wrote to you on my first arrival in New York, or whether you were accusing me of neglect, ingratitude, forgetfulness, and all the turpitudes that the delay of a letter sometimes causes folk to give other folk credit for. My occupations are incessant, or rather, I should say, my occupation, for to my sorrow I have but one. 'Tis not with me now as in the fortunate days when, after six rehearsals, a piece ran, as the saying is, twenty nights, leaving me all the mornings and three evenings in the week at my own disposal. Here we rush from place to place, at each place have to drill a new set of actors, and every night to act a different play; so that my days are passed in dawdling about cold, dark stages, with blundering actors who have not even had the conscience to study the words of their parts, all the morning. All the afternoon I pin up ribbons and feathers and flowers, and sort out theatrical adornments, and all the evening I enchant audiences, prompt my fellow-mimes, and wish it had pleased Heaven to make me a cabbage in a corner of a Christian kitchen-garden in—well, say Hertfordshire, or any other county of England; I am not particular as to the precise spot.... Whenever I can I get on horseback; it is the only pleasure I have in this world; for my dancing days are drawing to a close. But I mean to ride as long as I have a hand to hold a rein, or a leg to put over a pommel. By the by, I ought to beg your pardon for the last sentence; I ought to have said a foot to put into a stirrup; for if you are not ashamed of having legs you ought to be—at least, we are in this country, and never mention, or give the slightest token of having such things, except by wearing very short petticoats, which we don't consider objectionable.... I am glad you have furbished up and completed your little room, because it is a sign you mean to stay where you are, and I like to know where to find you in my imagination.... I have just seen dear Washington Irving, and it required all my sense of decent decorum to prevent my throwing my arms round his neck, he looked so like a bit of home, England.

You will be glad to hear that we are thriving, in body and estate. We are all well, and our work is very successful. The people flock to see us, and nothing can exceed the kindness which we meet with everywhere and from everybody.... I read nothing whatever since I am in this blessed land. The only books I have accomplished getting through have been Graham's "History of North America," Knickerbocker's "History of New York," which nearly killed me with laughing; "Contarini Fleming," which is very affected and very clever; sundry cantos of Dante, sundry plays of Shakespeare, sundry American poems [which are very good], and old Captain John Smith's quaint "History of Virginia." As fast as I gather my wits together for any steady occupation, I am whisked off to some new place, and do not recover from one journey before I have to take another. The roads here shake one's body, soul, thoughts, opinions, and principles all to pieces; I assure you they are wicked roads.

Our theater, Covent Garden, is, we understand, going to the dogs. I cannot help it any more, that is certain, and feel about that as about all things that have had their day—it must go. Taglioni is like a dream, and you must not abuse Mademoiselle Mars to me. I never saw her but twice—in "L'Ecole des Vieillards" and "Valérie"—and I thought her perfection in both.... If I do not leave off, you will be blind for the next fortnight with reading this crossed letter. I wish you success most heartily in all you undertake, and am truly and faithfully yours,

Fanny Kemble.

[Washington Irving was intimately acquainted with my father and mother, and a most kind and condescending friend to me. He often told me that when first he went to England, long before authorship or celebrity had dawned upon him, he was a member of a New York commercial house, on whose affairs he was sent to Europe. It was when he was a mere obscure young man of business in London that he had been introduced to my mother, whose cordial kindness to him in his foreign isolation seemed to have made a profound impression on him; for when I knew him, in the days of his great literary celebrity and social success, he often referred to it with the warmest expressions of gratitude. I think, of all the distinguished persons I have known, he was one of the least affected by the adulation and admiration of society. He remained quite unchanged by his extreme social popularity. Simple, unaffected, unconstrained, genial, kindly, and good, he seemed so entirely to forget his own celebrity, that one almost forgot it too in talking to him. I remember his coming, the day after my first appearance at Covent Garden, to see us, and congratulated my parents on the success of that terrible experiment. I, who was always delighted to see him, ran to fetch the pretty new watch I had received from my father the night before, and displayed its beauties with an eager desire for his admiration of them. He took it and slowly turned it about, commending its fine workmanship and pretty enamel and jewelry; then putting it to his ear, with a most mischievous look of affected surprise, he exclaimed, as one does to a child's watch, "Why, it goes, I declare!"

To my great regret and loss, I saw Mademoiselle Mars only in two parts, when, in the autumn of her beauty and powers, she played a short engagement in London. The grace, the charm, the loveliness, which she retained far into middle age, were, even in their decline, enough to justify all that her admirers said of her early incomparable fascination. Her figure had grown large and her face become round, and lost their fine outline and proportion; but the exquisite taste of her dress and graceful dignity of her deportment, and sweet radiance of her expressive countenance, were still indescribably charming; and the voice, unrivaled in its fresh melodious brilliancy, and the pure and perfect enunciation, were unimpaired, and sounded like the clear liquid utterance of a young girl of sixteen. Her Celimène and her Elmire I never had the good fortune to see, but can imagine, from her performance of the heroine in Casimir de la Vigne's capital play of "L'Ecole des Vieillards," how well she must have deserved her unrivaled reputation in those parts.

It is remarkable that one of the most striking points in Madame d'Orval was suggested by herself to the author. De la Vigne, according to the frequent usage of French authors, was reading his piece to the great actress, upon whom its success was mainly to depend, and when he came to the scene where the offended but unjustly suspicious husband recounts to his wife the details of his duel with the young duke whose attentions to her had excited his jealousy, and that when, full of the tenderest anxiety for his safety, she flies to meet him, and is repulsed by the bitter irony of his speech, beginning, "Rassurez-vous, madame, le duc n'est point blessé," Mademoiselle Mars, having listened in silence till the end of D'Orval's speech, exclaimed, "Mais, quoi! je ne dis rien, elle ne dit rien!" De la Vigne, who had made the young woman listen in speechless anguish to the bitter and unjust reproach conveyed by her husband's first words and his subsequent account of the duel, said, in some surprise at Mademoiselle Mars' suggestion, "Mais quoi encore—que peut-elle dire? que voudriez-vous qu'elle dise?" "Ah, quelquechose!" cried Mademoiselle Mars, clasping her hands in the imagined distress of the situation; "rien—deuxmots seulement. 'Ah, monsieur!' quand il dit, 'Rassurez-vous, madame, le duc n'est point blessé.'" "Eh bien! dites, dites comme cela," cried De la Vigne, amazed at all the expression the exquisite voice and face had given to the two words. And so the scene was altered, and the long recital of D'Orval was broken by the reproachful "Ah, monsieur!" of his wife, and seldom has the utterance of such an insignificant exclamation affected those who heard it so keenly. For myself, I never can forget the sudden, burning blush that spread tingling to my shoulders at all the shame and mortification and anguish conveyed in the pathetic protest of that "Ah, monsieur!" of Mademoiselle Mars.

Dr. Gueneau de Mussy, who knew her well, and used to see her very frequently in her later years of retirement from the stage, told me that he had often heard her read, among other things, the whole play of "Le Tartuffe," and that the coarse flippancy of the honest-hearted Dorinne, and the stupid stolidity of the dupe Orgon, and the vulgar, gross, sensual hypocrisy of the Tartuffe, were all rendered by her with the same incomparable truth and effect as her own famous part of the heroine of the piece, Elmire. On one of the very last occasions of her appearing before her own Parisian audience, when she had passed the limit at which it was possible for a woman of her advanced age to assume the appearance of youth, the part she was playing requiring that she should exclaim "Je suis jeune! je suis jolie!" a loud, solitary hiss protested against the assertion with bitter significance. After an instant's consternation, which held both the actors and audience silent, she added, with the exquisite grace and dignity which survived the youth and beauty to which she could no longer even pretend, "Je suis Mademoiselle Mars!" and the whole house broke out in acclamations, and rang with the applause due to what the incomparable artiste still was and the memory of all that she had been.]

New York, February 21, 1833.

It is a long time since I have written to you, my dearest H——.... My work is incessant, ... and there is no end to the breathless hurry of occupation we pass our days in. Here is already a break since I began this letter, for we are now in Philadelphia, on our way to Washington, and it is Thursday, the 3d of March.... It has been matter of serious regret to me that I have not, from the very first day of my becoming a worker for wages, looked more into the details of my earnings and spendings. I have felt this particularly lately from circumstances relative to V——'s position, which is a very sad one, from which I have been very anxious to relieve her.... All I know at present is, that since we have been here in America our earnings have already been sufficient to enable us to live in tolerably decent comfort on the Continent.... Do you know, dearest H——, that it is not impossible that I may never return to England to reside there. See it again, I will, please God to grant me life and eyes, but the state of my father's property in Covent Garden is such that it seems more than likely that he may never be able to return to England without risking the little which these last toilsome years will have enabled him to earn for the support of his own and my mother's old age. He will be compelled, in all likelihood, to settle and die abroad, as my uncle John did, by the liabilities of that ruinous possession of theirs, the first theater of London. When first my father communicated this chance to me, and expressed his determination, should the affairs of the theater remain in their present situation, to buy a small farm in Normandy, and go and live there, my heart sank terribly. This was very different from my girlish dream of a life of lonely independence among the Alps, or by the Mediterranean; and the idea of living entirely out of England seems to me now very sad for all of us.... However, there are earth and skies out of England. What does Imogen say?—

and if God vouchsafe me my faculties, and I can bid farewell to this life of distasteful toil, I have visions of studies and pursuits which I think might make existence very happy in a farm in Normandy, though such might not have been my own choice.... What special inquiries did you wish me to make about General Washington? I was, when at Washington, within fifteen miles of Mount Vernon, his home and burying-place, but could not make time to go thither. I have one of his autograph letters, and if there be any indication of character in handwriting—which I hope to goodness there is not—it certainly exists in his, for a firmer, clearer, and fairer hand I never saw—an excellent, honest handwriting. His likeness confronts one at every corner here; not only at every street corner, where he lends his countenance to the frequenters of drinking-houses, but over every chimney-piece in every sitting-room. He is like the frogs of the old Egyptian plague, except that they were in the king's chamber, where he was too good a Republican ever to have been.

I am amused at your summing up your account of the restless and perturbed state of poor Ireland by saying, "After all, I believe America is the land of peace and quiet." It seems to me, who am here, that everything at this moment threatens change and disintegration in this country. It is impossible to imagine more menacing elements of discord and disunion than those which exist in the opposite and antagonistic interests of its southern and northern provinces, and the anomalous mixture of aristocratic feeling and democratic institutions.... God bless you, my dear H——. I will write to you soon again; if possible, before the breathing-time this snow-storm is giving us is over.

Ever affectionately yours,

F. A. K.

New York, April 3, 1833.

My dearest H——,

... I am working very hard, what with rehearsing, acting, studying new parts, devising new dresses, and attending—which, of course, I am obliged also to do—to the claims of the society in which we are living, and my time is so full that I barely contrive to fulfill all my duties and answer all the claims made upon me.... The spring is in the sky, and in the air her soft smile and sweet breath are gladdening the world; but the process of vegetation is much later in beginning, and much more rapid in its operations when they do begin here, than with us. Though the last three days have been as hot as our midsummer weather, the trees are yet leafless and budless—as dry and unpromising-looking as they were in mid-winter; and, indeed, the transition from winter to summer is almost instantaneous here. The spring does not stand coaxing and beckoning the shy summer to the woods and fields as in our country, but while winter yet seems lord of the ascendant, and his white robes are still covering land and water, suddenly the summer looks down upon the earth from the cloudless sky, and, as by magic, the ice melts, the snow evaporates, the trees are clothed with green, the woods are full of flowers, and the whole world breaks out into a hallelujah of warmth, beauty, and blossoming like mid-July in our deliberate climate. This again lasts, as it were, but a day; the sun presently becomes so powerful that the world withers away under the intense heat, the flowers and shrubs fade, and instead of screening and refreshing the earth, are themselves scorched and parched with the glaring fierceness of the sky; the ground cracks, the watercourses dry up, the rivers shrink in their beds, and every human creature that can flies from the lowlands and the cities to go up into the north or to the mountains to find breath, shelter, and refreshment from the sultry curse. Then comes the autumn, and that is most glorious; not soft and sad as ours, but to the very threshold of winter bright, warm, lovely, and gorgeous. Two seasons remain to our earthly year, remembrances, I think, of Paradise; the spring in Italy, and autumn in America....

You ask me how I "fit in" to my American audiences? Why, very kindly indeed. At first they seemed to me rather cold, and I felt this more with regard to my father than myself, but I think they have grown to like us; I certainly have grown to like them, and their applause satisfies me amply.... I heard yesterday of one of Sir Thomas Lawrence's prints of me which was carried by a peddler beyond the Alleghany Mountains [the Alleghany Mountains then were further than the Rocky Mountains are now from the Atlantic seaboard], and bought at an egregious price by a young engineer, who with fifteen others went out there upon some railroad construction business, were bidding for it at auction in that wilderness, where they themselves were gazed at, as prodigies of strange civilization, by the half-savage inhabitants of the region. That touched and pleased me very much.... We are going to act here till the 12th of this month, when we go to Boston, where we shall remain for a month; after which we return here for a week, and then proceed to Philadelphia by the 1st of June, where we intend closing our professional labors for the summer. Thence we shall probably go to Niagara and the Canadas. My father has talked of spending a little quiet time in Rhode Island, where the weather is cool and we might recruit a little; but there does not seem much certainty about our plans at present. In the autumn we shall begin our progress toward New Orleans, where we shall probably winter, and act our way back here by the spring, when I hope and trust we shall return to England.... The book of Harriet Martineau's which you bade me read is delightful. I have not quite finished it yet, for I have scarcely any time at all for reading; for want of the habit of thinking and reading on such subjects I find the political economy a little stiff now and then, though the clearness and simplicity with which it is treated in this story are admirable. I did not know that I was supposed to be the original of Letitia.... God bless you, my dearest H——.

I am ever your most affectionate,

F. A. K.

"For Each and for All" was, I think, the name of the volume taken from Miss Martineau's admirable series of political economy tales, which my friend, Miss S——, sent me. The heroine of the story is a young actress, and Miss Martineau once told me that she had derived some slight suggestion of the character from me.

New York, Friday, April 10, 1833.

My dearest H——,

... On Monday last I acted Lady Macbeth; on Tuesday, Lady Townley; on Wednesday, Belvidera; and last night, Portia, and Mary Copp in "Charles II." This is pretty hard work. To-morrow we start for Boston, which we shall reach on Sunday, and Monday our work begins there.... I think four nights a week as much as either my father or myself ought to work, and as much as we really can work profitably, the rest being money taken from our capital—i.e., our health. But in Boston we shall act for three weeks or a month every night but the Saturdays. [The days when four or five performances a week were considered a sufficient exertion for popular actors or singers are far enough in the past, and now there seems to be no limit to the capacity of such artists for earning money by the exercise of their talents. Five and six performances a week are the normal number now expected from great European stars, or rather those which great European stars expect to give and to be paid for. Their health is one invariable sacrifice to this over-work, and their artistic excellence a still more grievous one. It has been asked why artists invariably return to Europe comparatively coarse and vulgar in the style of their performances, and the result is attributed to the want of refined taste and critical judgment of the American audiences—in my opinion very unjustly, for if want of knowledge and nice perception in the public induces carelessness and indifference in performers, the grasping greed of gain and incessant over-exertion, mental and physical, for the sake of satisfying it, is a far more certain cause of artistic deterioration. During Madame Ristori's last visit to America, I went to see a morning performance of "Elizabeta d'Inglterra" by her. Arriving at the theater half an hour before the time announced for the performance, I found notices affixed to the entrances, stating that the beginning was unavoidably delayed by Madame Ristori's non-arrival. The crowd of expectant spectators occupied their seats and bore this prolonged postponement with American—i.e., unrivaled—patience, good-temper, and civility. We were encouraged by two or three pieces of information from some official personage, who from the stage assured us that the moment Madame Ristori arrived (she was coming by railroad from Baltimore) the play should begin. Then came a telegram, she was coming; then an announcement, she was come; and driving from the terminus straight to the theater, tired and harassed herself with the delay, she dressed herself and appeared before her audience, went through a part of extraordinary length and difficulty and exertion—almost, indeed, a monologue—including the intolerable fatigue and hurry of four or five entire changes of costume, and as the curtain dropped rushed off to disrobe and catch a train to New York, where she was to act the next morning, if not the evening, of that same day. I had seen Madame Ristori in this part in England, and was shocked at the great difference in the merit of her performance. Every particle of careful elaboration and fine detail of workmanship was gone; the business of the piece was hurried through, with reference, of course, only to the time in which it could be achieved; and of Madame Ristori's once fine delineation of the character, which, when I first saw it, atoned for the little merit of the piece itself, nothing remained but the broad claptrap points in the several principal situations, made coarse, and not nearly even as striking, by the absence of due preparation and working up to them, the careless rendering of everything else, and the slurring over of the finer minutiæ and more delicate indications of the whole character. It was a very sad spectacle to me.]

Besides your letter, the poor old Pacific (the ship that brought us to America) brought me something else to-day. While Washington Irving was sitting with me, a message came from the mate of the Pacific with a large box of mould for me. I had it brought in, and asking Irving if he knew what it was, "A bit of the old soil," said he; and that it was.... Washington Irving was sure to have guessed right as to my treasure, and I was not ashamed to greet it with tears before him.... He is so sensible, sound, and straightforward in his way of seeing everything, and at the same time so full of hopefulness, so simple, unaffected, true, and good, that it is a privilege to converse with him, for which one is the wiser, the happier and the better....

Here is Monday, April 15th, Boston, my dear H——. We arrived here yesterday evening, and in the course of this morning I have already received fourteen visitors, all of whom I shall have to go and waste my time with in return for their kind waste of theirs upon me.... To-morrow I begin my work with "Fazio" and go to a party afterward....

Tuesday, 16th.

... This morning I have been to rehearsal, and out shopping, and received crowds of strangers who come and call upon us.... To-night I make my first appearance here in "Fazio," and we hear the theater will be crammed, and I am going to a party after that dreadful play; not by way of delight, but of duty, and a severe one it will be. To-morrow I act Mrs. Haller, Thursday Lady Teazle, and Friday Bianca again; Saturday is a blessed holiday.... I have finished Smith's "Virginia," which I found rather tiresome toward the end. I have finished Harriet Martineau's political-economy story, which I liked exceedingly. I am reading a small volume of Brewster's on "Natural Magic," which entertains me very much; but I am dreadfully cramped for time, and my poor mind goes like a half-tended garden, which every now and then makes me feel sad.

You would have been pleased, dear H——, if you had heard Washington Irving's answer to me the other day when, in talking with him of my profession and my distaste for it, I complained of the little leisure it left me for study and improving myself, for reading, writing, and the occupations that were congenial to me. "Well," he said, "you are living, you are seeing men and things, you are seeing the world, you are acquiring materials and heaping together observations and experience and wisdom, and by and by, when with fame you have acquired independence and retire from these labors, you will begin another and a brighter course with matured powers. I know of no one whose life has such a promise in it as yours." Oh! H——, I almost felt hopeful while he spoke so to me....

[Alas! my kind friend was no prophet. Not many months after, sitting by him at a dinner-party in New York, he said to me, "So I hear you are engaged to be married, and you are going to settle in this country. Well, you will be told that this country is like your own, and that living in it is like living in England: but do not believe it; it is no such thing, it is nothing of the sort; which need not prevent your being very happy here if you make the best of things as you find them. Above all, whatever you do, don't become a creaking door." "What's that?" asked I, laughing. He then told me that his friend Leslie, the painter, who was, I believe, like his contemporary and charming rival artist, Gilbert Stewart Newton, an American by birth, had married an Englishwoman, whom he had brought out to America, "but who," said Irving, "worried and tormented his and her own life out with ceaseless complaints and comparisons, and was such a nuisance that I used to call her 'the creaking door.'"]

Good-by, and God bless you, dearest H——.

I am affectionately yours,

Fanny Kemble.

Boston, Sunday, April 21, 1833.

Dear Mrs. Jameson,

There lies in my desk, and has lain, I am ashamed to say, for a long time now, an unanswered letter of yours, which smites my conscience every time I open that useful receptacle (desk, not conscience), where it has, I am sorry to say, many companions in its own predicament. My time is like running water, and the quickest, but the rapids of Niagara, that ever ran, I think; and every hour, as it flies away, is filled with so much that must be done, letting alone so much that I would wish to do, that I am fairly out of breath, and feel as if I were flying myself in a whirling high wind, and if ever I stop for a moment, shan't be surprised to find that I have gone crazy. I think I should like to spend a few days entirely alone in a dark room, secluded from every sight and sound, for my senses are almost worn out, and my sense exhausted, with looking, hearing, feeling, going, doing, being, and suffering. Our work is incessant; we never remain a month in any one place, and we are scarce off our knees from putting things into drawers than we are down on them again to take them out and put them all back into trunks. My health has not suffered hitherto from this constant exertion, but I am occasionally oppressed with the dreadful unquietness of our life, and long for a few moments' rest of body and of mind.

This is our first visit to this place, and I am enchanted with it. As a town, it bears more resemblance to an English city than any we have yet seen; the houses are built more in our own fashion, and there is a beautiful walk called the Common, the features of which strongly resemble the view over the Green Park just by Constitution Hill. The people here take more kindly to us than they have done even elsewhere, and it is delightful to act to audiences who appear so pleasantly pleased with us....

Only think! a book was sent to me from Philadelphia the other day which proved to be the "Diary of an Ennuyée." I have no idea who it came from, or who made so good a guess at that old predilection of mine. I fell to forthwith—for that book has always had a most powerful charm for me—and read, and read on, though I have read it many a time through before, and though I had been acting Bianca, and my supper was on my plate before me.

I heard the other day mention of another work of yours, since the Shakespeare book. If you are not weary of writing to me, with such long intervals between your question and my reply, tell me something of this new work in your next letter.

Our plans for the summer are yet unsettled.... I was much disappointed on arriving here to find that Dr. Channing has left Boston for the South. His health is completely broken, and the bleak and bitter east wind that blows perpetually here is a formidable enemy to life, even in stronger frames than his....

The hotel in which we are lodging here is immediately opposite the box-office, and it is a matter of some agreeable edification to me to see the crowds gathering round the doors for hours before they open, and then rushing in, to the imminent peril of life and limb, pushing and pommeling and belaboring one another like madmen. Some of the lower class of purchasers, inspired by the thrifty desire for gain said to be a New England characteristic, sell these tickets, which they buy at the box-office price, at an enormous advance, and smear their clothes with treacle and sugar and other abominations, to secure, from the fear of their contact of all decently-clad competitors, freer access to the box-keeper. To prevent, if possible, these malpractices, and secure, to ourselves and the managers of the theater any such surplus profit as may be honestly come by, the proprietors have determined to put the boxes up to auction and sell the tickets to the highest bidders. It was rather barbarous of me, I think, upon reflection, to stand at the window while all this riot was going on, laughing at the fun; for not a wretch found his way in that did not come out rubbing his back or his elbow, or showing some grievous damage done to his garments. The opposite window of my room looks out upon a churchyard and a burial-ground; the reflections suggested by the contrast between the two prospects are not otherwise than edifying.... Good-by; God bless you!

I am ever yours, most truly,

Fanny Kemble.

New York, Friday, May 24, 1833.

My dearest H——,

I received your last letter, dated the 22d March, a week ago, when I was in Boston, which we have left, after a stay of five weeks, to return here, where we arrived a few days ago....

Boston is one of the pleasantest towns imaginable. It is built upon three hills, which give it a singular, picturesque appearance, and I suppose suggested the name of Tremonte Street, and the Tremonte Hotel, which we inhabited. The houses are many of them of fine granite, and have an air of wealth and solidity unlike anything we have seen elsewhere in this country. Many of the streets are planted with trees, chiefly fine horse-chestnuts, which were in full leaf and blossom when we came away, and which harmonize beautifully with the gray color and solid handsome style of the houses. They have a fine piece of ground, like a park, in one part of the town, which, together with the houses round it, reminded me a good deal of the Green Park and the walk at the back of Arlington Street.

[The addition of the new part of Boston, stretching beyond the Common and the public Gardens, has added immensely to the beauty of the city, and the variety of the buildings and alternate views at the end of the vistas of the fine streets, looking toward Dorchester Heights, and those ending in the blue waters of the bay and Charles River, not unfrequently reminded me both of Florence and Venice, under a sky as rich, and more pellucid, than that of Italy.]

The country all round the neighborhood of Boston is charming. The rides I took in every direction were lovely, and during the last fortnight of our stay nothing could exceed the exquisite brightness of the spring weather. The apple trees were all in bloom, the lilacs in flower, and everything as sweet, fresh, and enchanting as possible.... How I wish you could have seen the glorious Hudson with me the other day, now that the woods on its banks are dark with the shade of their thick and varied foliage! How you would have rejoiced in the beautiful and noble river scenery! This is "a brave new world," more ways than one, and we are every way bound to like it, for our labor has been most amply rewarded in its most important result, money; and the universal kindness which has everywhere met us ever since we first came to this country ought to repay us even for the pain and sorrow of leaving England. We are to remain here about ten days longer, and then proceed to Philadelphia, where we shall stay a fortnight, and then we start for cool and Canada, taking the Hudson, Trenton Falls, and Niagara on our way; act in Montreal and Quebec for a short time, and then adjourn, I hope, to Newport in Rhode Island, to rest and recruit till we begin our autumnal work.... And now I have done grumbling at "the state of life into which it has pleased God to call me." My dear H——, I began this letter yesterday, and am this moment returned from a long visit to Dr. Channing.... The outward man of the eloquent preacher and teacher is rather insignificant, and produces no impression at first sight of unusual intellectual supremacy; and though his eyes and forehead are fine, they did not seem to me to do justice to the mind expressed in his writings; for though Shakespeare says,

I think the mental qualities are more often detected there than the moral ones. He is short and slight in figure, and looks, as indeed he is, extremely delicate, an habitual invalid; his eyes, which are gray, are well and deeply set, and the brow and forehead fine, though not, perhaps, as striking as I had expected. The rest of the face has no peculiar character, and is rather plain.

He talked to me a great deal about the stage, acting, the dramatic art; and, professing to know nothing about it, maintained some theories which proved he did not, indeed, know much. As far as knowledge of the stage and acting goes, of course this was not surprising, his studies, observation, and experience certainly not having lain in that direction; indeed, if they had, he might not have shown more comprehension of the subject. Sir Thomas Lawrence is the only unprofessional person I ever heard speak upon it whose critical opinion and judgment seemed to me worth anything; but it appeared to me that, in the course of the discussion, some of Dr. Channing's opinions (with all respect be it spoken) betrayed an ignorance of human nature itself, upon which, after all, dramatic literature and dramatic representation are founded. He asked me if at the present day, and in our present state of civilization, such a character as Juliet could be imagined possible; so that I believe I was a little disappointed, in spite of his greatness, his goodness, and my reverence and admiration for him.

I went to call on him with a Miss Sedgwick, a person of considerable literary reputation here, and whose name and books you may perhaps have heard of. One of them, "Hope Leslie," is, I think, known in England. Though she is a good deal older than myself, I have formed a great friendship with her; she is excellent, as well as very clever and charming. She knows Dr. Channing intimately, and is a member of his church....

It is now Monday morning, dear H——, and I am presently going to set off to the races. American races! only think of that! I who never saw but one in my own country, and was totally uninterested by it! But I am going chiefly to please a nice little woman who is just married, and whose husband has several horses that are to run, so perhaps I shall find these more exciting than I did the races I attended at home. They are very little supported or resorted to here; the religious and respectable part of the community disapprove of them. There is a general prejudice against them, and they are even preached against; so that they are entirely in the hands of a few gentlemen of fortune, who keep them up, partly for their amusement, and partly with a view to the improvement of the breed of horses in this country. The running is said to be very good, the show is nothing.... However, I am going, and therefore you may look hereafter to hear—what you shall hear now—because I'm just come back, and am happy to inform you that my friend's husband's horse won the race. The stake was only £2000—no very great matter—but still enough to make the result interesting, if not important; though I think the hazard we ran of our lives at starting was the most exciting part of the day.

The racecourse is on Long Island, and, to reach it, one crosses the arm of the sea that divides that strip of land from New York in a steam ferryboat. All these transports were so thronged to-day with carriages, horses, and a self-governed, enlightened, and very free people, that in all my life I never saw anything so frightful as the confusion of the embarking and disembarking....

Dr. Channing was talking to me the other day of Harriet Martineau's writings, and has sent me "Ella of Garvelock," recommending it highly as an interesting story, though he does not seem to think Miss Martineau's principles of political economy sufficiently sound to make her works as useful upon that subject, or to do all the good which she herself evidently hopes to produce by these tales....

God bless you, dear friend! I am ever most truly yours,

F. A. K.

New York, Sunday, June 24, 1833.

Great was my surprise, dear Mrs. Jameson, to find accompanying your letter of April 9th a card of Mr. Jameson's. My father called upon him almost immediately, but had not the good fortune to find him at home, and I presume he is now gone on to Canada, whither we are ourselves proceeding, and where we may very possibly meet him. Our spring engagements are all over, and we are now going away from the hot weather to Niagara, into which, if all tales be true, I expect to fall headlong, with sheer surprise and admiration; after which I shall accompany my father to Montreal and Quebec, where we shall resume our professional labors....

I am very sorry you have been ill. You do not speak of your eyes, from which I argue that you were not painfully conscious of the existence of those valuable luminaries at the time you wrote....

The accounts, public and private, that we receive of the state of England are not encouraging, and the trouble seems such as neither Tory, Whig, nor even Radical, can cure. You talk of bringing out a colony to this country; bring out half of England, and those who starve at home will have to eat, and to spare, here. How I do wish our poor laboring people could be made to know how easily they might exchange their condition for a better one!

I wish you could have heard what my father was reading to us this morning out of Stewart's "North America;" not Utopian dreams of some imaginary land of plenty and fertility, but sober statements of authentic fact, telling of the existence of unnumbered leagues of the richest soil that ever rewarded human industry an hundredfold; wide tracts of lovely wilderness, covered with luxuriant pasture, and adorned profusely with the most beautiful wild flowers; great forests of giant timber, and endless rolling prairies of virgin earth, untouched by ax or plow; a world of unrivaled beauty and fertility, untenanted and empty, waiting to receive the over-brimming populations of the crowded lands of Europe, and to repay their labor with every species of abundance. It is strange how slow those old-world, weary, working folk have hitherto been to avail themselves of God's provision for them here.... You tell me you are working hard, but you do not say at what. Innumerable are the questions I have been asked about you, and a Philadelphian gentleman, a very intelligent and clever person, who is a large bookseller and publisher here, bade me tell you that you and your works were as much esteemed and delighted in in America as in your own country. He was so enthusiastic about you that I think he would willingly go over to England for the sole purpose of making your acquaintance.

[It is a pity that the American law on the subject of copyright should have rendered Mr. Carey's admiration of my friend and her works so barren of any useful result to her. Any tolerably just equivalent for the republication of her books in America would have added materially to the hardly earned gains of her laborious literary life.]

I am already half moulded into my new circumstances and surroundings; and though England will always be home to my heart, it may be that this country will become my abiding-place; but if you come out to Canada we shall meet on this side of the Atlantic instead of the other....

Believe me ever yours truly,

F. A. K.

To Miss Fitzhugh.

Montreal, July 24, 1833.

My dearest Emily,

Within the last fortnight we have progressed, as we say in this country, over about nine hundred and fifty miles of land and water. We have gone up the Hudson, seen Trenton, the most beautiful, and Niagara, the most awful, of waterfalls. As for Niagara, words cannot describe it, nor can any imagination, I think, suggest even an approximate idea of its terrible loveliness. I feel half crazy whenever I think of it. I went three times under the sheet of water; once I had a guide as far as the entrance, and twice I went under entirely alone. If you fancy the sea pouring down from the moon, you still have no idea of this glorious huge heap of tumbling waters. It is worth crossing the Atlantic to see it.... As I stood upon the brink of the abyss when I first saw it, the impulse to jump down seemed all but an irresistible necessity, and but for the strong arm that held mine fast I think I might very well have taken the same direction as the huge green glassy mountain of water that was pouring itself headlong into—what no eye can penetrate. It literally seemed as if everything was going down there, and one must go along with everything. The chasm into which the cataract falls is hidden by dense masses of snowy foam and spray, rising in an everlasting creation of cloud up into the sky, and vailing the frantic fury of the caldron below, where the waves churn and tread each other underfoot in the rocky abyss that receives them, in darkness which the sun's rays cannot penetrate nor the strongest wind for a moment disperse; a mystery, of which its thousand voices reveal nothing. It is nonsense writing about it—seeing and hearing are certainly, in this case, the only reasons for believing. I think it would be delightful to pass one's life by this wonderful creature's side, and quite pleasant to die and be buried in its bosom....

We left that wonderful place a few days ago, steamed across Lake Ontario, came down the rapids of the St. Lawrence in an open boat, sang the Canadian boat song, and are now safe and sound, only half roasted, in his Majesty's dominions. Of all that we have seen, Niagara is, of course, the old object beyond all others, but we were delighted with the softness and beauty of a great deal of the scenery that we saw in traversing the State of New York—one of twenty States, not the largest of the twenty, but large enough to hold England in its lap.

The rapids of the St. Lawrence, though, I believe, really rather dangerous to descend, have so little appearance of peril that I derived none of the excitement I had expected, and which a little danger always produces, from going through them. Instead of shooting down long sheets of rushing water, which was what I expected, we were tossed and tumbled and shaken up and down, in the midst of a dozen conflicting currents and eddies, which break the whole surface of the river into short pitching waves, and dance about in frantic white whirligigs, like the circles of the bad nuns' ghosts, in Meyerbeer's devilish Opera....

Good-by, my dearest Emily. I am always affectionately yours,

F. A. K.

Steamboat St. Patrick, on the St. Lawrence, August 17, 1833.

My dearest H——,

There is lying in my desk an unfinished letter to you, begun about a week ago, which is pausing for want of an opportunity to go on with it; but here I am, a prisoner in a steamboat, destined to pass the next four and twenty hours on the broad bosom of the St. Lawrence, and what can I do better than begin a fresh chapter to you, leaving the one already begun to be finished on my next holiday. My holidays, indeed, are far from leisure time, for when I have nothing to do I have all the more to see; so that I am as busy and more weary than if I were working much harder.

We have been staying for the last fortnight in Quebec, and are now on our way back to Montreal, where we shall act a night or two, and then return to the United States, to New York and Boston.... The greater part of these poems of Tennyson's which you have sent me we read together. The greater part of them are very beautiful. He seems to me to possess in a higher degree than any English poet, except, perhaps, Keats, the power of writing pictures. "The Miller's Daughter," "The Lady of Shalott," and even the shorter poems, "Mariana," "Eleänore," are full of exquisite form and color; if he had but the mechanical knowledge of the art, I am convinced he would have been a great painter. There are but one or two things in the volume which I don't like. "The little room with the two little white sofas," I hate, though I can fancy perfectly well both the room and his feeling about it; but that sort of thing does not make good poetry, and lends itself temptingly to the making of good burlesque.

I have much to tell you, for in the last two months I have seen marvelous much. I have seen Niagara. I wish you had been there to see it with me. However, Niagara will not cease falling; and you may, perhaps, at some future time, visit this country. You must not expect any description of Niagara from me, because it is quite unspeakable, and, moreover, if it were not, it would still be quite unimaginable. The circumstances under which I saw it I can tell you, but of the great cataract itself, what can be told except that it is water?

I confess the sight of it reminded me, with additional admiration, of Sir Charles Bagot's daring denial of its existence; having failed to make his pilgrimage thither during his stay in the United States, he declared on his return to England that he had never been able to find it, that he didn't believe there was any such thing, and that it was nothing but a bragging boast of the Americans.

At Albany, our first resting-place from New York, we had been joined by Mr. Trelawney, who had been introduced to me in New York, and turned out to be the well-known friend of Byron and Shelley, and author of "The Adventures of a Younger Son," which is, indeed, said to be the story of his own life.

[His wild career of sea-adventure with De Ruyter, who was supposed to have left him at his death all his share of the results of their semi-buccaneering exploits, his friendship and fellowship with Byron and Shelley, the funeral obsequies he bestowed upon the latter on the shore of the Gulf of Spezzia, his companionship in the mountains of Greece with the patriot chief Odysseus, and his marriage to that chief's sister, are all circumstances given with more or less detail in his book, which was Englished for him by Mary Shelley, the poet's widow, who was much attached to him; Trelawney himself being quite incapable of any literary effort which required a knowledge of common spelling.... He was strikingly handsome when first I knew him, with a countenance habitually serene, and occasionally sweet in its expression, but sometimes savage with the fierceness of a wild beast. His speech and movements were slow and indolently gentle, his voice very low and musical, and his utterance deliberate and rather hesitating; he was very tall, and powerfully made, and altogether looked like the hero of a wild life of adventure, such as his had been. I hear he is still alive, a very wonderful-looking old man, who sat to Millais for his picture, exhibited in 1874, of the "Old Sea-Captain."]

We all liked him so well that my father invited him to join our party, and travel with us to Niagara, whither he was bound as well as ourselves. He had seen it before, and though almost all the wonders of the world are familiar to him, he said it was the only one that he cared much to see again.

We reached Queenstown on the Niagara River, below the falls, at about twelve o'clock, and had three more miles to drive to reach them. The day was serenely bright and warm, without a cloud in the sky, or a shade in the earth, or a breath in the air. We were in an open carriage, and I felt almost nervously oppressed with the expectation of what we were presently to see. We stopped the carriage occasionally to listen for the giant's roaring, but the sound did not reach us until, within three miles over the thick woods which skirted the river, we saw a vapory silver cloud rising into the blue sky. It was the spray, the breath of the toiling waters ascending to heaven. When we reached what is called the Niagara House, a large tavern by the roadside, I sprang out of the carriage and ran through the house, down flights of steps cut in the rock, and along a path skirted with low thickets, through the boughs of which I saw the rapids running a race with me, as it seemed, and hardly faster than I did. Then there was a broad, flashing sea of furious foam, a deafening rush and roar, through which I heard Mr. Trelawney, who was following me, shout, "Go on, go on; don't stop!" I reached an open floor of broad, flat rock, over which the water was pouring. Trelawney seized me by the arm, and all but carried me to the very brink; my feet were in the water and on the edge of the precipice, and then I looked down. I could not speak, and I could hardly breathe; I felt as if I had an iron band across my breast. I watched the green, glassy, swollen heaps go plunging down, down, down; each mountainous mass of water, as it reached the dreadful brink, recoiling, as in horror, from the abyss; and after rearing backward in helpless terror, as it were, hurling itself down to be shattered in the inevitable doom over which eternal clouds of foam and spray spread an impenetrable curtain. The mysterious chasm, with its uproar of voices, seemed like the watery mouth of hell. I looked and listened till the wild excitement of the scene took such possession of me that, but for the strong arm that held me back, I really think I should have let myself slide down into the gulf. It was long before I could utter, and as I began to draw my breath I could only gasp out, "O God! O God!" No words can describe either the scene itself, or its effect upon me.

We staid three days at Niagara, the greater part of which I spent by the water, under the water, on the water, and more than half in the water. Wherever foot could stand I stood, and wherever foot could go I went. I crept, clung, hung, and waded; I lay upon the rocks, upon the very edge of the boiling caldron, and I stood alone under the huge arch over which the water pours with the whole mass of it, thundering over my rocky ceiling, and falling down before me like an immeasurable curtain, the noonday sun looking like a pale spot, a white wafer, through the dense thickness. Drenched through, and almost blown from my slippery footing by the whirling gusts that rush under the fall, with my feet naked for better safety, grasping the shale broken from the precipice against which I pressed myself, my delight was so intense that I really could hardly bear to come away.

The rock over which the rapids run is already scooped and hollowed out to a great extent by the action of the water; the edge of the precipice, too, is constantly crumbling and breaking off under the spurn of its downward leap. At the very brink the rock is not much more than two feet thick, and when I stood under it and thought of the enormous mass of water rushing over and pouring from it, it did not seem at all improbable that at any moment the roof might give way, the rock break off fifteen or twenty feet, and the whole huge cataract, retreating back, leave a still wider basin for its floods to pour themselves into. You must come and see it before you die, dear H——.

After our short stay at Niagara, we came down Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence to Montreal and Quebec. Before I leave off speaking of that wonderful cataract, I must tell you that the impression of awe and terror it produced at first upon me completely wore away, and as I became familiar with it, its dazzling brightness, its soothing voice, its gliding motion, its soft, thick, furry beds of foam, its vails and draperies of floating light, and gleaming, wavering diadems of vivid colors, made it to me the perfection of loveliness and the mere magnificence of beauty. It was certainly not the "familiarity" that "breeds contempt," but more akin to the "perfect love" which "casteth out fear;" and I began at last to understand Mr. Trelawney's saying that the only impression it produced on him was that of perfect repose; but perhaps it takes Niagara to mesmerize him.

[The first time I attempted to go under the cataract of Niagara I had a companion with me, and one of the local guides, who undertook to pilot us safely. On reaching the edge of the sheet of water, however, we encountered a blast of wind so violent that we were almost beaten back by it. The spray was driven against us like a furious hailstorm, and it was impossible to open our eyes or draw our breath, and we were obliged to relinquish the expedition. The next morning, going down to the falls alone, I was seduced by the comparative quietness and calm, the absence of wind or atmospheric disturbance, to approach gradually the entrance to the cave behind the water, and finding no such difficulty as on the previous day, crept on, step by step, beneath the sheet, till I reached the impassable jutting forward of the rock where it meets the full body of the cataract. My first success emboldened, me to two subsequent visits, the small eels being the only unpleasant incident I encountered. The narrow path I followed was a mere ledge of shale and broken particles of the rock, which is so frayable and crumbling, either in its own nature, or from the constant action of the water, that as I passed along and pressed myself close against it, I broke off in my hands the portions of it that I grasped.]

A few miles below the falls is a place called the whirlpool, which, in its own kind, is almost as fine as the fall itself. The river makes an abrupt angle in its course, when it is shut in by very high and rocky cliffs—walls, in fact—almost inaccessible from below. Black fir trees are anchored here and there in their cracks and fissures, and hang over the dismal pool below, most of them scathed and contorted by the fires or the blasts of heaven. The water itself is of a strange color, not transparent, but a pale blue-green, like a discolored turquoise, or a stream of verdigris, streaked with long veins and angry swirls of white, as if the angry creature couldn't get out of that hole, and was foaming at the mouth; for, before pursuing its course, the river churns round and round in the sullen, savage, dark basin it has worn for itself, and then, as if it had suddenly found an outlet, rushes on its foaming, furious way down to Ontario. We had ridden there and alighted from our horses, and sat on the brink for some time. It was the most dismal place I ever beheld, and seemed to me to grow horribler every moment I looked at it: drowning in that deep, dark, wicked-looking whirlpool would be hideous, compared to being dashed to death amid the dazzling spray and triumphant thunder of Niagara.

[There are but three places I have ever visited that produced upon me the appalling impression of being accursed, and empty of the presence of the God of nature, the Divine Creator, the All-loving Father: this whirlpool of Niagara, that fiery, sulphurous, vile-smelling wound in the earth's bosom, the crater of Vesuvius, and the upper part of the Mer de Glace at Chamouni. These places impressed me with horror, and the impression is always renewed in my mind when I remember them: God-forsaken is what they looked to me.]

I do not believe this whirlpool is at all as generally visited as the falls, and perhaps it might not impress everybody as it did me.

Quebec, where we have been staying, is beautiful. A fortress is always delightful to me; my destructiveness rejoices in guns and drums, and all the circumstance of glorious war. The place itself, too, is so fiercely picturesque—such crags, such dizzy, hanging heights, such perpendicular rocky walls, down to the very water's edge, and such a broad, bright bay. The scenery all round Quebec is beautiful, and we went to visit two fine waterfalls in the neighborhood, but of course to us just now there is but one waterfall in the world.... God bless you, dear!

Ever affectionately yours,

F. A. K.

To Mrs. Jameson.

New York, Tuesday, October 15, 1833.

You are wandering, dear Mrs. Jameson, in the land of romance, the birthplace of wild traditions, the stronghold of chivalrous legends, the spell-land of witchcraft, the especial haunt and home of goblin, specter, sprite, and gnome; all the beautiful and fanciful creations of the poetical imagination of the Middle Ages. You are, I suppose, in Germany; intellectually speaking, almost the antipodes of America. Germany is now the country to which my imagination wanders oftener than to any other. Italy was my wishing land eight years ago, but many things have dimmed that southern vision to my fancy, and the cloudier skies, wilder associations, and more solemn spirit of Germany attract me more now than the sunny ruin-land....

I shall not return to England, not even to visit it now—certainly never to make my home there again. "The place that knew me will know me no more," and you will never again have the satisfaction of coming to me after a first night's new part to say all manner of kind things about it to me. My feelings about the stage you know full well, and will rejoice with me that there is a prospect of my leaving it before its pernicious excitements had been rendered necessary to me by habit. Yet when I think of my "farewell night," I cannot help wishing it might have taken place in London, before my own people, who received my first efforts so kindly, and where I stood in the very footprints, as it were, of my kindred.... Thank you for your long and entertaining letter, and for the copy of the second edition of "Shakespeare's Women." You cannot think how extremely popular you are in this country. A lady assured me the other day, that when you went to heaven, which you certainly would, Shakespeare would meet you and kiss you for having understood, and made others understand, him so well. If ever you do come to this side of that deep, dividing ditch, which you speak of as not an improbable event, you will find as much admiration waiting for you here as you can have left behind; whether it is equally valuable, it is for you to judge.... I have seen Niagara since last I wrote to you, and it was in a balcony almost overhanging it that I saw your husband, and that he gave me long accounts of your literary plans.

Dear Mrs. Jameson, this is a short and stupid letter, but I have been working awfully hard, and have not been well for the past month, and am not capable of much exertion. It is quite a novelty to me, and not an agreeable one, to feel myself weak, and worn out, and good for nothing. Good-by; write to me from some of your halting-places, and believe me ever yours truly,

F. A. K.

I noted the altered frontispiece of my little book.

Boston, April 16, 1834.

Dear Mrs. Jameson,

I received a kind and interesting letter from you, dated "Munich," some time past, and lately another from London, telling me of the alarm you experienced with regard to your father's health, and your sudden return from Germany, which I regretted very much, for selfish as well as sympathetic motives. You were not only enjoying yourself there, but were gathering materials for the enjoyment of others; and I am as loath to lose the benefit of your labors as sorry that your pleasant holiday was thus interrupted.

It is now probable, unless the Atlantic should like me better going than it did coming, and that it should take me to its bosom, that I may be in London in July, when I hope I shall find you there.... I am coming back to England, after all, and shall, I think, remain on the stage another year....

I received, a few days ago, a letter from dear H——, in which she mentioned that you had an intention of writing a memoir or biographical sketch of "the Kemble family," in which, if I understood her right, you thought of introducing the notice which you wrote for Hayter's drawings of me in Juliet. She said that you wished to know whether I had any objection or dislike to your doing so, and I answered directly to yourself, "None in the world." I had but one fault to find with that notice of me, that it was far too full of praise; I thought it so sincerely. But, without wishing to enter into any discussion about my merits or your partiality, I can only repeat that you are free to write of me what you will, and as you will; but, for your own sake, I wish you to remember that praise is, to the majority of readers, a much more vapid thing than censure, and that if you could admire me less and criticise me more, I am sure, as the housemaids say, you would give more satisfaction. However, keep your conscience by you; praise or blame, it is none of my business. Talking of that same Juliet, I received a letter from Hayter the other day which gave me some pain. He tells me that he has all those sketches on his hands, and asks me if I am inclined to take them of him. I fear his applying to me, at such a distance, on this subject, is a sign that he is not prosperous or doing well. He is an amiable, clever little man, and I shall feel very sorry if my surmise proves true. My father wishes to have the collection, and I shall write to tell him so forthwith.

It is no slight illustration to me of the ephemeral nature of the popularity which I enjoyed, to think that those drawings, which, as works of art, were singularly elegant and graceful, should go a-begging for a purchaser. Verily "all is vanity!"

[My friend, Lord Ellesmere, purchased the series of drawings Mr. Hayter made from my performance of Juliet; and on my last visit to Lady Ellesmere at Hatchford, she pointed them out to me round a small hall that led to her private sitting-room, over the writing-table of which hung a miniature of me copied from a drawing of Mrs. Jameson's by that charming and clever woman, Miss Emily Eden.]

You will be sorry for me and for many when I tell you that our good, dear friend Dall is dangerously ill. I am writing at this moment by her bed.... This is the only trial of the kind I have ever undergone; God has hitherto been pleased to spare all those whom I love, and to grant them the enjoyment of strength and health. This is my first lonely watching by a sick-bed, and I feel deeply the sadness and awfulness of the office.... Now that I am beginning to know what care and sorrow really are, I look back upon my past life and see what reason I have to be thankful for the few and light trials with which I have been visited. My poor dear aunt's illness is giving us a professional respite, for which my faculties, physical and mental, are very grateful. They needed it sorely; I was almost worn out with work, and latterly with anxiety and bitter distress.

We terminated our last engagement here on Friday last, when the phlegmatic Bostonians seemed almost beside themselves with excitement and enthusiasm: they shouted at us, they cheered us, they crowned me with roses. Conceive, if you can, the shocking contrast between all this and the silent sick-room, to which I went straight from the stage....

Surely, our profession involves more intolerable discords between the real human beings who exercise it and their unreal vocation, than any in the world!... In returning to England, two advantages, which I shall value much, will be obtained: a fortnight's rest during the passage, and, I hope, not quite such hard work when I resume my labors.... As for the hollowness and heartlessness of the world, by which one means really the people that one has to do with in it, I cannot say that I trouble my mind much about it. In their relations with me I commit every one to their own conscience; if they deal ill by me, they deal worse by themselves.... I hope you may be in London when we reach it. Farewell.

I am ever yours truly,

Fanny Kemble.

New York, Thursday, April 24, 1834.

My dear H——,

This will be but a short letter, the first short one you will have received from me since we parted. Dear Dall has gone from us. She is dead; she died in my arms, and I closed her eyes.... I cannot attempt to speak of this now, I will give you all details in my next letter. It has been a dreadful shock, though it was not unexpected; but there is no preparation for the sense of desolation which oppresses me, and which is beyond words.... I wrote you a long letter a few days ago, which will perhaps have led you to anticipate this. We shall probably be in England on the 10th of July.... The sole care of my father, who is deeply afflicted, and charge of everything, devolves entirely on me now.... We left Boston on Tuesday.... I act here to-night for the first time since I lost that dear and devoted friend, who was ever near at hand to think of everything for me, to care for me in every way. I have almost cried my eyes out daily for the last three months; but that is over now. I am working again, and go about my work feeling stunned and bewildered....

I saw Dr. Channing on Monday; he has just lost a dear and intimate connection. With what absolute faith he spoke of her! Gone! to the Author of all good. That which was good must return to Him. It is true, and I believe it, and know it; but at first I was lost.... God bless you, dear H——. We shall meet erelong, and in the midst of great sorrow that will be a great joy to

Yours ever affectionately,

F. A. K.

We have buried dear Dall in a lonely, lovely place in Mount Orban's Cemetery, where —— and I used to go and sit together last spring, in the early time of our intimacy. I wished her to lie there, for life and love and youth and death have their trysting-place at the grave.

My aunt died in consequence of an injury to the spine, received by the overturning of our carriage in our summer tour to Niagara.

I was married in Philadelphia on the 7th of June, 1834, to Mr. Pierce Butler, of that city.

THE END.