[Boston—Tuesday, 22 January 1867]
Tuesday lovely day; was out several hours in the soft exhilarating air. Breakfasted with Louise Kellogg, the singer, and her mother. Mrs K. is one of the queer products of Connecticut, sharp, keen, penetrating, spiritualist, a woman with ideas, daring, everything in short but that rarest subtlest and distinctive element of the true woman, refinement. We laughed and talked and made very merry, Mrs K. prepared us wonderful potatoes and told stories, finally unfolding to us an idea she had conceived that Mrs Murray who paints these marvellous water-colors did not do them herself but copied and finished from work left by her father!! This was too absurd because we had seen Mrs Murray at work and Lissie had seen her best pictures in progress but nothing could get the fancy quieted because forsooth “the bumps of her forehead were not such as a painter must possess.”
We went immediately from the breakfast to call on Mrs M. and were more struck than ever with the ability she shows. Her pictures are not intellectual strictly speaking, but coming of a large family of artists she started with an education few possess. Beside she has a realistic brain and sees and paints clearly the phases of life she comprehends. Nothing explains Mrs M. more entirely to me than the fact that she sees nothing here to paint. She has made one portrait but it is far from being a good one either as painting or likeness.
In the afternoon read Ste. Beuves marvellous “Portraits de femmes”; marvellous to a foreigner for the exquisite finesse. Beside the tenderness he evinces—think of a critic whose soul is filled with tenderness, that anomaly is Ste. Beuve.
