In the summer of 1847 Hans Andersen was in England. “He is the lion of London this year,” writes Miss Mitford. “Dukes, princes, and ministers are all disputing for an hour of his company, and Mr. Boner (his best translator) says that he is quite unspoilt, as simple as a child and with as much poetry in his everyday doings as in his prose.... Mr. Boner sent me the other day for dear Patty Lovejoy’s album (she is a sweet little girl of eleven years old) an autograph of Spohr’s and one of Andersen’s. The latter is so pretty that I must transcribe it for you. “‘How blue are the mountains! How blue the sea and the sky! It is the expression of love in three different languages. H. C. Andersen.’ London, July 16th, 1847.” The Mr. Boner alluded to was a valued friend of Miss Mitford’s with whom she corresponded much during the later years of her life. CHAPTER XXXVII FAREWELL TO THREE MILE CROSS Writing to her American friend Mr. Fields in December, 1848, after a sharp attack of illness, Miss Mitford says: “But I have many alleviations [to my sufferings] in the general kindness of the neighbourhood, the particular goodness of many admirable friends, the affectionate attention of a most attached and affectionate old servant, and above all in my continued interest in books and delight in reading. I love poetry and people as well at sixty as I did at sixteen, and can never be sufficiently grateful to God for having permitted me to retain the two joy-giving faculties of admiration and sympathy, by which we are enabled to escape from the consciousness of our own infirmities into the great works of all ages and the joys and sorrows of our immediate friends.” Much as she loved reading, however, Miss Mitford did justice to another source of comfort for women that is open to all, namely needle-work, “that most effectual sedative, that grand soother and composer of woman’s distress,” as she truly styles it. “Is American literature,” she asks Mr. Fields, “rich in native biography? Just have the goodness to mention to me any lives of Americans, whether illustrious or not, that are graphic, minute and outspoken. I delight in French memoirs and English lives, especially such as are either autobiography or made out by diaries and letters; and America, a young country, with manners as picturesque and unhackneyed as the scenery, ought to be full of such works.” And again she writes later on: “I have been reading the autobiographies of Lamartine and Chateaubriand.... What strange beings these Frenchmen are! Here is M. de Lamartine at sixty, poet, orator, historian and statesman, writing the stories of two ladies—one of them married—who died for love of him! Think if Mr. Macaulay should announce himself a lady-killer, and put the details not merely into a book but into a feuilleton!”