Dear Mother:
Pigeon Cove is a bit of seashore, meant originally for the
Isles of Shoals, but finally tacked on to mainland and thus brought near a
railroad and some woods, with plenty of granite quarries thrown in. . . .
The rocks are precisely like Appledore and so would be the
surf if there were any, but there never is any on our coast, except in storms.
I always distrust that part of "Thalatta," when I am on the spot. The
secret of the ocean is in the horizon line; the actual height of the waves is
always absurdly small.
Here we have, for lions, artists instead of authors, though
Whipple is here whom you saw at dinner and who is thought very brilliant,
though he seems to me only dry and keen and critical. At a house below are some
H—— and C—— of Cambridge showy, dressy women who are or have been belles; one
of them is just engaged to Darley, the artist, who is here also. Yesterday I
went on a long walk in the woods with Darley and Kensett — Kensett it was who
illustrated Curtis's “Lotus-Eating” and drew one curl of a wave at the bottom
of a page which has haunted me ever since. Kensett is about my age, short,
stout, and heavy with a pleasant, genial face, dark eyes and hair and beard;
Darley is larger, of English frame and substance, with sandy hair and
moustache; face pockmarked and rather coarsely colored; cool, semi-military
air. It was pleasant to be seated in the woods and have Darley's sketches
passed about: some fine figures of guides and Indians at Moosehead. . . .
Kensett came for a day with Tom Appleton, the renowned, Mrs. Longfellow's
brother; Curtis, “Mot Natelpha,” a famous wit and connoisseur; he it was who
said, “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 146-7
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