Showing posts with label Rose Terry Cooke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rose Terry Cooke. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Louisa Storrow Higginson, January 1860

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