Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/265

 Readings, and was greatly delighted. My acquaintance with her has also afforded me great pleasure and interest. She is full of genius, and is, in every respect, a richly-gifted woman, with a warm heart and noble mind, and with life and with “spirit” enough to ride a horse to death every day, and to master every man or woman who might attempt to master her. Proud one moment, as the proudest queen, she can yet, towards an unpretending being, be the next as humble and as amiable as an amiable young girl. Loving splendour, and expensive in her way of life and her habits, she can yet be simple as a simple countryman or a peasant-maiden; thus, she often, in the country, dressed in man's attire, goes ranging about through wood and field, and on one occasion she herself drove a cow home to Miss Sedgewick, who had lost hers, and who now received this as a present from her “sublime” Fanny. (N.B.—She lives in Miss Sedgewick's neighbourhood and the two are very fond of each other.) She utters the noblest thoughts, yet she is deficient in the more refined womanliness, and seems to me not to understand the true dignity of her own sex. But she understands Shakspeare, and reads incomparably. Her Henry V., Brutus, Cleopatra (in the death scene), I shall never forget.

Maria Lowell accompanied me to the forenoon readings last Saturday. She read Shakspeare's enchanting “As you like it,” and she read it enchantingly well. After the reading I invited her to take luncheon with me, together with the young Lowells.

She came brimful of life, warm from the reading, and warm from the increased warmth of her hearers; her eye seemed to comprehend the whole world, and the dilated nostrils seemed to inhale all the affluent life of the world. By chance, it so happened, that Laura Bridgeman with her attendant, had come to call on me at the same time, and was seated in my room as Fanny Kemble entered. Fanny Kemble had never before seen the blind, deaf and