“I have just got thy pleasant letter. I am afraid I cannot answer it very well for I am under the baleful influence of our reluctant and baffling New England spring and my head is in no condition to think. I was at Amesbury nearly a month, most of the time seeing nobody and rather glad of it, as I was overdone with folks at Boston.
“I quite agree with what thee say of ‘The Little Pilgrim’ and the life beyond generally. But I like ‘The Little Pilgrim’ story better than Dante’s pictures of Heaven—an old man sitting eternally on a high chair and concentric circling saints, martyrs, and ordinary church members whirling around him in perpetual gyration and singing ‘glory!’ Ah me! It is idle to speculate on these things. All I ask for is to be free from sin and to meet the dear ones again.... I am not able to do much—even reading is often painful; but the east winds will soon blow themselves out, and I shall feel better, I trust.”
In another letter he says:
“I have just sent a poem to the ‘Atlantic’ which perhaps nobody will like. But I do and that is enough, as I wrote it to free my mind.” The poem was “Rabbi Ishmael.”
In 1880 in a letter from Oak Knoll to the writer, he says: “I wonder whether you are enough in the country at Au—to see the progress of spring in grass and bud and blossom. Have you birds about you? Here we have a good many. Last night a pretty rabbit came up under our windows and the gray squirrels are plenty. I have been hoping to get out to see you; but if I cannot, you must come here. Two of our folks are in California this spring.”
Of all the birds he speaks in his letters most of the bluebirds, those messengers of spring. In a letter in 1881, he says: “The winter has been rather hard on me and I have suffered from the inability to get out of doors much. I shall be glad to hear the bluebirds.” At another time, “The bluebirds are singing in our pines.” And again, “The bad weather has made me ill; and I shall not try Boston again until the bluebirds come.” Still again, “The weather now looks like spring. A bluebird sang today on our grounds.”
In the April of 1884 he wrote from Oak Knoll:
“I hoped to be in Boston at this time but I hardly feel strong enough to go away at present. Somehow the long, dark winter and spring have been rather hard upon me. Today I am rejoicing in the sunshine and hope it has come to stay. Unlike Lowell in his ‘Bigelow Papers,’ I don’t