God would not have created so much beauty without also creating an eye to see and a soul to feel it? As if God could not be a poet! The author of the book of Genesis knew better. However, it is something to have had an eye see what we are seeing; it seems to double the effect by some occult sympathy, and my rainbows are always composed of one part rain, one part sunshine, and one part blessed Henry Vaughan with his ‘Still young and fine,’ and his ‘World’s gray fathers in one knot!’ The older I grow the more I am convinced that (there) are no satisfactions so deep and so permanent as our sympathies with outward nature.... “In some moods I heartily despise and hate myself, there is so much woman in me ( ... I mean no harm. I was designed, sketched rather, for a man). Why, I found myself the other day standing in a muse with something like tears in my eyes, before a little _pirus_ that had rooted itself on the steep edge of the runnel that drains the meadow above Craigie’s pond, and thinking--what do you suppose? Why, how happy and careless the life of such a poor shrub was compared with ours! But I was in a melancholy and desponding mist of mind, and I snatched myself back out of it to manlier thoughts. But the reality and sincerity of the emotion struck me as I mused over it, and I set it down on the debtor side of my account. Still, _can_ one get away from his nature? That always puzzles me. Your close-grained, strong fellows tell you that you can, but they forget that they are only acting out their complexion, not escaping it. I did not expect to chase my rainbow into such a miserable drizzle, but for that very reason I will let it go as I have written it, though I am rather ashamed of having uncovered my nakedness so plumply. In spite of the heat we have had rain enough to keep the country beautiful, and my salt marshes have been in their glory. The salt grass is to other grass like fur compared with hair, and the color of the ‘black grass,’ and even its texture at the right distance remind one of sable. I have been making night studies of late, having enjoyed, as folks say, a season of sleeplessness, and I saw the dawn begin the other night at two o’clock. The first bird to sing was a sparrow. The cocks followed close upon him, and the phœbe upon them. The crows were the latest to shake the night out of them. “The Corporation have given me a tutor and cut my salary down to $1500. But I think they will give me what they call a ‘gratuity’ if the college funds justify it. If not, I must take to lecturing.... I am called away to the hayfield, so good-by. I work more or less every day out of doors and like it. I am getting back as well as I can to my pristine ways of life.”