blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the
mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that
it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift, indeed,
could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied,
and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient
of the pallor of words.

She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid
personality; as the authoress of 'Amber Gods', and 'In a Cellar', and
'Circumstance', and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle
and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs.
Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day. It
was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up
from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the
evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that
she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he
named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I
felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and
now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a
purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps,
however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the
fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New England
background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of
light. Its effects were such as could not last, or could not be farther
evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away from its
environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the
great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of romantic motives and
passions. But for what they were, I can never think them other than what
they appeared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic
mind. I feel better than I can say how necessarily they were the