"Deacon Pitkin's Farm" is full of those thoroughly truthful touches of
New England in which, if you are not unrivaled, I do not know who your
rival may be. I wiped the tears from one eye in reading "Deacon
Pitkin's Farm."
I wiped the tears, and plenty of them, from both eyes, in reading
"Betty's Bright Idea." It is a most charming and touching story, and
nobody can read who has not a heart like a pebble, without being
melted into tenderness.
How much you have done and are doing to make our New England life
wholesome and happy! If there is any one who can look back over a
literary life which has pictured our old and helped our new
civilization, it is yourself. Of course your later books have harder
work cut out for them than those of any other writer. They have had
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" for a rival. The brightest torch casts a shadow in
the blaze of a light, and any transcendent success affords the easiest
handle for that class of critics whose method is the one that Dogberry
held to be "odious."
I think it grows pleasanter to us to be remembered by the friends we
still have, as with each year they grow fewer. We have lost Agassiz
and Sumner from our circle, and I found Motley stricken with
threatening illness (which I hope is gradually yielding to treatment),
in the profoundest grief at the loss of his wife, another old and dear
friend of mine. So you may be assured that I feel most sensibly your
kind attention, and send you my heartfelt thanks for remembering me.
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