[Manchester—Tuesday, 13 August 1867]
Tuesday 13th Have been strolling about out of doors all the morning. Going to the beach directly after breakfast I found a cool south wind blowing, waves tossing, the tide rising and “life at full” as Nature seemed to say with one of her brightest smiles—after I left the beach I wandered among green trees and blowing clover until noon. I felt pretty warm and not much like study on returning home although I had read nothing but a canto of Dante in the old apple tree all the morning. After dinner I worked myself into—or I should rather say, was so wrought upon by the beauty of Howells’ prose article called “Minor Italian Travels” in the “Atlantic” that I felt the witchery of poetry thrown over me and came to think prose the only true expression.
Yesterday afternoon J. & I walked over to the Dana’s. The old gentleman was sitting on the piazza as we approached & his son soon came out to join him—two or three fluttering dresses were down on the beach below and a child at play. The afternoon was perfect in gold and blue and the whole scene one of great loveliness. Mr Dana Senior is to be eighty years old, God willing, in September. His white hair and delicate figure combined with a lively expression give him a look of venerableness deprived of the feeble senility common to great age. He is proud as well as fond of his son whom he esteems as one of the greatest as well as most agreeable of our men in which faith perhaps he is not far beyond the rest of us. Add to these already assembled on the piazza, old “Aunt Betsy” an exceeding bright if somewhat enfeebled old lady, little Henrietta of nine years only, with dark absorbing eyes, Sallie an invalid at present, of about twenty and a covey of pretty daughters between and one honest faced boy and we have the picture complete! Yes! complete as a picture may be with accessions all given and the first figure wanting, for Mamma is there too with clear gray eyes not to be looked into and forgotten.
