Nothing is more rare than a talent to describe landscape, and,
especially, skyscape, or cloudscape, although a vast number of
letters, from correspondents between the ages of twenty and thirty,
are filled with experiments in this kind. Margaret, in her turn, made
many vain attempts, and, to a lover of nature, who knows that
every day has new and inimitable lights and shades, one of these
descriptions is as vapid as the raptures of a citizen arrived at his
first meadow. Of course, he is charmed, but, of course, he cannot tell
what he sees, or what pleases him. Yet Margaret often speaks with a
certain tenderness and beauty of the impressions made upon her.
TO ----.
'_Fishkill, 25 Nov., 1844_.--You would have been happy as I
have been in the company of the mountains. They are companions
both bold and calm. They exhilarate and they satisfy. To live,
too, on the bank of the great river so long, has been the
realization of a dream. Though I have been reading and
thinking, yet this has been my life.'
'After they were all in bed,' she writes from the "Manse," in Concord,
'I went out, and walked till near twelve. The moonlight filled
my heart.
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