I recognize some of our wild flowers in your “Songs of Seven.” By the way, Mr. Niles has sent me an illustrated copy of it, and what a gem it is! But I hardly know what are especially ours. Have you the tiny blue four-petaled “Houstonia Cærulia”?--our first flower of spring, that and the rock-saxifrage! And is October in England gladdened with the heavenly azure of the fringed gentian? And does the climbing bitter-sweet hang its orange-colored fruit high in the deep green of the pine-trees, in the autumn? The most wonderful climber I ever saw was the trumpet-vine of the West. It grew on the banks of the Mississippi, climbing to the top of immense primeval trees, bursting out, there, into great red, clarion-like flowers. It seems literally to fix a foot in the trees as it climbs,--and it has an uncivilized way of pulling the shingles off the roofs of the houses over which it is trained. I am glad that violets are common property in the world. The prairies are blue with them. How at home they used to make me feel! for they are New England blossoms too. I wonder if you like the mountains as well as you do the sea. I am afraid I do, and better, even. It seems half disloyal to say so, for I was born here; to me there is rest and strength, and aspiration and exultation, among the mountains. They are nearly a day’s journey from us--the White Mountains--but I will go, and get a glimpse and a breath of their glory, once a year, always. I was at Winnipiseogee, a mountain-girdled lake, in New Hampshire, when I saw your handwriting, first,--in a letter which told of your having been in Switzerland. We have no sky-cleaving Alps,--there is a massiveness, a breadth, about the hill scenery here, quite unlike them, I fancy. But such cascades, such streams as rise in the hard granite, pure as liquid diamonds, and with a clear little thread of music! I usually stop at a village on the banks of the Pemigewasset, a small silvery river that flows from the Notch Mountains,--a noble pile, that hangs like a dream, and flits like one too, in the cloudy air, as you follow the stream’s winding up to the Flume, which is a strange grotto, cut sharply down hundreds of feet through a mountain’s heart; an immense boulder was lodged in the cleft when it was riven, half way down, and there it forever hangs, over the singing stream. The sundered rocks are dark with pines, and I never saw anything lovelier than the green light with which the grotto is flooded by the afternoon sun. But I must not go on about the mountains, or I shall never stop,--I want to say something about our poets, but I will not do that, either. Beauty drifts to us from the mother-land, across the sea, in argosies of poetry. How rich we are with Old England’s wealth! Our own lies yet somewhat in the ore, but I think we have the genuine metal.