HOME, January 15, 1851.
DEAR MADAM,—It was very kind in you to take up my affairs, and I will say here upon the margin of this reply, that I SHOULD have very much liked your opinion of the "Pundison Letters" I sent out; but now—so long ago is it—I have had time to let my whimsical nature find some other occupation; and the "Up-Country Letters" may lie as they are, not unlikely for the next thousand years. I am absorbed and busied with Bishop Butler's Analogy, which is all things to me at this present; and I am not sure that "The House of the Seven Gables" could tempt me away from it until I get my fill. . . . The Bishop is great, and I hope to have him with me until the frost comes out of the ground, and I can busy myself with Nature herself.
I laughed the other day loud and long at a report of the plot of "The House of the Seven Gables," in a letter to a lady. . . . The remark was, that "the plot of 'The House of the Seven Gables' was—deepening damnably." . . . You speak of "the crimson and violet sunrises, and the green and gold sunsets," etc.; and I am glad to get so good an authority for the fact of mixed colors in sunrising. In my little book, I speak somewhere of "the silver and rose tint flame of the morning." . . . My wife, who sends her love, has taken possession of your note, and is to keep it somewhere "with care." That is, it is to be so carefully hidden that no one will ever find it. Perhaps she is a little jealous; but, in any case, she wants the autograph. Please make my regards to the man in "The House of the Seven Gables," and believe me, with sincere respect, Yours—obliged—
L. W. MANSFIELD.
HOME, January 22.
DEAR MADAM,—I suppose Mr. Hawthorne will smile at the idea of my writing him a letter of condolence, and such I do not intend; but I have been a little provoked at an article in "The Church Review;" and whether Mr. Hawthorne cares for my opinion or not, it will be a relief and satisfaction for me to say my say about it. Nor do I suppose that he can live so exclusively in a world of his own as not to be pleased at knowing that his friends recognize as such any impertinence that may be said about him. In this case also it comes home to the question which I submitted in the "Up-Country Letters," which I sent you. Now I will say (and I venture to say that I am one of twenty thousand respectable people that would say the same) that the little bits of personal description and reference which Mr. Hawthorne has given in two instances have added—I was going to say tenfold to the interest which attaches to all his writings, and so modestly and quietly, and in such exquisite taste were those references made, that it does strike me as the sublime of stupidity that any one could misunderstand them. . . .
Please excuse my long letter, and believe me, with sincere regards, yours,
L. W. MANSFIELD.
My mother's notes of every-day life proceed:—
January 2. This morning, one cloud in the east looked like a goldfish close to the horizon. I began to build a snow-house with the children, and shoveled paths.