glorious song that should be the gospel of Reform, full of consolation and strength to the oppressed, yet falling gently and restoringly as dew on the withered youth-flowers of the oppressor. That way my madness lies.” In the same letter, with the long-reaching speculation of a father over his first child, the subject of Blanche’s training is touched upon with a half serious, half playful exaggeration. Lowell had been writing humorously of his chivalric feelings toward dependents like the maid of all work in the house, and he breaks out: “I mean to bring up Blanche to be as independent as possible of all _man_ kind. I was saying the other day to her mother (who has grown lovelier than ever) that I hoped she would be a great, strong, vulgar, mud-pudding-baking, tree-climbing little wench. I shall teach her to swim, to skate, and to walk twenty miles a day as her father can--and by the time she is old enough, I do not despair of seeing the world so good that she can walk about at night alone without any danger. You ask the color of her eyes. They are said to be like her father’s,--but, in my opinion, they are of quite too heavenly a blue for that. But I do not think the color of the eyes of much import. I never notice it in those I love, or in any eyes where I can see deeper than the cornea and iris. I do not know the color of my father’s eyes, or of any of my sisters’ (except from hearsay), nor should I know that of Maria’s except from observations for that special end. But where your glance is arrested at the surface, where these windows are, as it were, daubed over with paint (like those of rooms where menial or unsightly offices are performed which we do not wish the world to see, or where something is exhibited for pay) to balk insight--then the color is the chief sight noticeable. I do not believe that the finest eyes have any special hue--and this is probably the ground for the fallacy that poets’ eyes are gray--a kind of neutral color.”