Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

F. A. B.

St. Simon's, March 10th, 1839.

BEAUTY OF THE SCENERY. I wish, dear Emily, I could for an instant cause a vision to rise before you of the perfect paradise of evergreens through which I have been opening paths on our estate, in an island called St. Simon's, lying half in the sea and half in the Altamaha. Such noble growth of dark-leaved, [wide-spreading] oaks; such exquisite natural shrubberies of magnolia, wild myrtle, and bay, all glittering evergreens of various tints, bound together by trailing garlands of wild jessamine, whose yellow bells, like tiny golden cups, exhale a perfume like that of the heliotrope and fill the air with sweetness, and cover the woods with perfect curtains of bloom; while underneath all this, spread the spears and fans of the dwarf palmetto, and innumerable tufts of a little shrub whose delicate leaves are pale green underneath and a polished dark brown above, while close to the earth clings a perfect carpet of thick-growing green, almost like moss, bearing clusters of little white blossoms like enameled stars; I think it is a species of euphrasia. It is the exceeding beauty of the whole which I wish you could see, and to which the most exquisite arrangement of art is in no way superior. I know it is common with the lovers of nature to undervalue art; but for all that, there are exceedingly few scenes in nature (except those of pre-eminent wildness and sublimity) where the genius of man, and his perception of beauty, may not remove and supply some things with advantage. In these wild evergreen plantations this is not the case; and all I have had to do, in following the cattle-tracks through these lovely woods, has been to cut the lower branches of the oaks which impede my progress on horseback, and sever the loving links of the wild garlands of blossoms, which had bound the shrubs together and drawn their branches into a canopy too low to admit of my riding beneath it; and you would laugh to see me with my peculiar slave, a young lad named Jack, of great natural shrewdness and no little humor, who is my factotum, and follows me on horseback with a leathern bag slung round his shoulders, containing a small saw and hatchet, and thus, like Sir Walter and Tom Purdie, we prosecute our labor of embellishment.

This Jack was out fishing with me the other day, and after about two hours' silent and unsuccessful watching of our floats, he gravely remarked, "Fishing bery good fun, when de fish him bite,"—an observation so ludicrous under the circumstances, that we both burst out laughing as soon as he uttered it.

St. Simon's Island, Sunday, March 17th, 1839.

My Dear Mrs. Jameson,

I cannot conceive how you could do such a wicked thing as to throw a letter you had begun into the fire, or such a cruel one as to inform the person who was to have received it of your exploit.

You burned your account of my sister's first appearance because, forsooth, the "newspapers" or "Harriet S——" would be sure to afford me the intelligence! But it so happens that I never see a newspaper, and that that identical letter of Harriet's was cast away in one of those unfortunate New York packets blown ashore in the late tremendous gales. It has since reached me, however; but she, too, thinking fit to go upon some fallacious calculation of human probabilities, takes it for granted that Adelaide has written me a full, true, and particular account of the whole business, and sums up all details in the mere intelligence, which had already reached me, of her having made a successful first appearance at Venice. Pray, my dear Mrs. Jameson, do not be afraid of supplying me with twice-told tales of my own people, but whenever you are good enough to write to me, let me know all that you know about them....

I do not know why you should have associated the ill-fated Pennsylvania with any thought of me. I never crossed the Atlantic in a ship so named, but the St. Andrew, one of the wrecked vessels, was the one in which we returned to America two years ago, and probably you may have written the one name for the other by mistake.

Of the appearance of your book, and the attention it has excited, I hear from Catharine Sedgwick. As for me, the only new book I have seen since my sojourn in these outhouses of civilization, is that exquisite volume whose evergreen leaves, of every tint and texture, are rustling in the bright sunshine and fresh sea-breeze of this delicious winter climate.