I have to thank you for some of the best thoughts and the purest pleasure I have ever derived from anything.
I am an American girl nineteen years of age, and was named from the hero of “Aylmer’s Field.”
I enclose some verses I have written. I would like exceedingly to hear your opinion of them and to know if they contain anything of promise.
Leoline * * *
(1877)
From America also we have one who modestly describes himself as “a mere Collegian, a youth to fortune and to fame unknown....”
I have during the past summer been engaged, to my great entertainment and instruction, in the perusal of your poetical works, reading many for the first time though of course familiar with a large number; having finished them, I could not refrain from expressing my admiration of your great genius in a few lines which I send herewith.
O Tennyson, how great a soul is thine!
Thy range of thought how varied
and how vast...
(1862)
Will you accept the enclosed lines as a slight testimonial of the high admiration entertained for your exquisite genius, by a rhyming daughter of Columbia; whose poetic wings just fledging from a first unpublished vol. (commended by Wm. Cullen Bryant and Geo. Bancroft, Esqrs.) permit only a feeble fluttering around the base of that “Parnassus,” whose summit you have so brilliantly, and justly attained. * * *