MY BLESSED MOTHER,--Your most welcome and beautiful letter of the 11th I very gladly received. You take our reverse of fortune in the way I hoped you would. I feel "beyond the utmost scope and vision of calamity" (as Pericles said to Aspasia), while my husband satisfies my highest ideal, and while the graces of heaven fill the hearts of my children. Everything else is very external. This is the immortal life which makes flowers of asphodel bloom in my path, and no rude step can crush them. I exult in my husband. He stands upon a table-land of high behavior which is far above these mean and false proceedings, with which a party of intriguers are now concerning themselves, and covering themselves with the hopeless mud of Dante's Inferno. The more harm they try to do, deeper down they plunge into the mire; and I doubt if ever in this world some of them will be able to wash their faces clean again. My husband supposed he was removed because he was a Democrat (and you know very well how he has always been a Democrat, not a Locofoco--if that means a lucifer match). Therefore he took it as a matter of course in the way of politics; though it surprised me, because General Taylor had pledged himself not to remove any person for political opinions, but only for dishonesty and inefficiency. This was why all Mr. Hawthorne's Whig as well as Democrat friends were sure he would not be disturbed. He could not even have provoked hostility by having taken any active part in politics,--never writing, never speaking, never moving for the cause. But these intriguers secretly carried out their plan. They wrote in letters false charges which they sent to Washington, and thirty gentlemen signed their names to a paper requesting the appointment of Mr. Putnam. June 21, Thursday.