Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/57

Rh for my own part, never would alter anything in the works which I had written long since, even where I saw their faults, and could easily correct them; because, where an author lives and writes through a long course of years, his or her works constitute a history of that author's development, which ought to remain unaltered as a history in itself, alike instructive to him as to others. An author's works are portions of an autobiography, which he must write whether he will or not.

Miss Sedgwick invited me to her house in Lennox, in the western part of Massachusetts, during the next summer, and promised to visit with me a Shaker establishment in New Lebanon, which lies at no great distance from her house.

Whilst Miss Sedgwick has been here the Downings have made an excursion with us to the top of South Beacon, one of the highest hills in the highlands of this district. Mr. Downing drove me, and for this mountain-road a skilful driver and a good horse were really needful, because the road was steep, and rather an apology for a road than anything else. But we stumbled and struggled over stock and stone in our light carriage, until we had ascended about nine hundred feet, and from the top of the wood-covered hill looked down upon half the world, as it seemed to me, but which presented the appearance of a billowy chaos of wooded heights and valleys, in which human dwellings were visible, merely as specks of light, scarcely discernible to the naked eye. Man, so great in his suffering, in his combat, vanished into nothing, seen from this material hill-top, and therefore I thought not about him. That which was most refreshing to me in this landscape was the view of the Hudson, which, like a clear thought bursting from chaos, makes for itself a path through the woods, and flows brilliantly forth into the infinite. Our party was a little too large and a little too merry for me. I know not how it is that a thoughtful &emsp;