Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Colonel Charles Russell Lowell to Josephine Shaw Lowell, August 25, 1864

Halltown, Aug. 25, 1864.

It's nice to have you be at home picking yourself up again; don't you like to have lives continuous and not “jumpy”? I do. I shouldn't want a monotonous life, but to get the full benefit from a varied life, I think you must have a “base” to return to occasionally and quietly ruminate. You see I'm arranging so that just as long as the war lasts, you’ll have to be leading just the best theoretic life. After the war is over (ten years from now) we shall be so old that some other life will be theoretically better, — or perhaps we shall be too old to care much for theories.

I wish you could look in and see what a pretty little grove we are in, — you'd be quite jealous of me, unless Hastings is very pleasant, — and you'd see the red blankets, and of course me upon them, and I should get up and we'd go and see Berold together. The rascal, I think he is quite proud of his discovery about bullets, and exaggerates his feelings on the subject accordingly. However, he's a good horse, the best horse I have.

SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, p. 328-9

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