Ashfield, 14 July, 1864.
Your notes are so pleasant and add to the worth of our evening
mail so much that I wish you would write to me every day. Last night, just at
sunset, when Jane and Dora1 and I came back from renewing our youth
in gathering the wild raspberries on a beautiful hillside half a mile away,
Susan met us just as we came in sight of home, with your note and the other letters
and papers which the coach from Deerfield had just brought in. I looked first
to see what had become of the world during the day before, to find out whether
the raiders had yet reached their fate after scaring Pennsylvania out of its
senses and trampling “My Maryland” in the dust, — and finding that we were
still cut off from Washington and still the victims of rumors, — I opened your
note and was contented.
Ashfield has neither telegraph nor railroad, and but one
mail a day, — and it is a good, patriotic, happy little village, that does not
believe in being excited, but holds firm to its faith in the country and is
quiet in the assurance that the rebels are soon to be on their knees. It is so pleasant
a place that I hope you will come up to see it and us while we are here. The
scenery all around us is delightful, with the mingled charms of fresh wild
nature and the cultivation of cheerful farms. It is prettier than any other
scenery I know in Massachusetts, — and is like the tamer parts of the English
lake country. The village is as quiet as if every day were Sunday. The people
are all well off. There are no poor in the town. The air is cool and fresh, the
hills have a fine wind blowing across their tops, the little brooks run singing
and leaping down their sides, the fields are gardens of wild fruit, the woods
are thick and dark and beautiful as the forest of Broceliande, the glades look
like the openings in a park, — one could write Massachusetts idylls or a New
England “Arcadia” in this happy, tranquil region of the world. . . .
_______________
1 Mrs. Norton's youngest sister, Miss Theodora
Sedgwick.
SOURCE: Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters
of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 273-4
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