January, 1860
Dearest Mother:
I have not written very punctually, but it is from wandering
up and down the world lecturing. . . .
I enjoyed Hartford. . . . There I saw Rose Terry. She lives
in a sort of moated grange a mile out of town, an old house with an air of
decay, once lovely among its fields and shrubbery, now more lonely with the
city grown up to it. There she has lived for sixteen years with an old gray
father and a sister more finely organized and invalid than herself, and the
healthy tone of the majority of her stories seemed more surprising than the
weirdness of the minority. She seems seven and twenty, tall and sallow, with
fine eyes, the lower part of her face the smallest and narrowest I ever saw,
with a slender, slight voice scarcely audible. She is full of talent, feeling,
and delicate humor, very lovable, I should think, but impulsive and vehement,
and with a satire as fine as the edge of a lancet. Her sister is married now,
and she lives alone with her flowers and her father.
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 101
