I felt the beauty of those mountains around the Lake, as I floated among them, but I wished for thee all the while; because I have always associated thee with my first glimpse of them, and somehow it seems as if they belonged to thee or thee to them, or both. They would not speak to me much; I needed an interpreter: and when they grew so dim and spectral in the noon haze, they gave me a strange almost shuddering feeling of distance and loneliness.
But I am glad thee saw the Notch Mountains, and those grand blue hills up the river that I used to watch through all their changes. I am glad Miss B---- saw thee, for she was as much disappointed as I when we gave up the hope of your coming. I felt almost certain you would both come; I wanted Lizzie to know the mountains.
Is it right to dream and plan for another year? How I should like to go to Franconia with thee and Elizabeth to see those great gates of the Notch open gradually wider and wider, and then to pass through to a vision of the vast range beyond! It is but a vague memory to me; I long to take that journey again.
But everything has wearied me this summer, and I feel almost like dropping my dreams and never expecting anything more. It is doubtless wiser to take what a kind Providence sends, just as it comes: yet who is always wise? Twice I rested in the sight of your beautiful river and on that cottage doorstep at Campton, looking off to the mountains. But the sea tired me with its restlessness. I wanted to tell it to be still. And I was very willing to get back from it to the quiet of my room, to the shelter of these friendly elms, and to the steady cheerful music of crickets and grasshoppers.
I shall be very happy to try to write a hymn for the Horticultural Association, as you request; and will send you something as soon as I can....
In the autumn of 1862, Miss Larcom decided to give up teaching at Wheaton Seminary. Ill health for some time had made her complain of a constant sense of weariness in her head. Living in the crowded school when she longed for quiet, and preparing her work for extra classes, she became nervously exhausted; so that when an invitation came from Esther’s mother, requesting her to spend the winter in Waterbury, Connecticut, she readily accepted it. She longed to be in the peaceful home made sacred by the presence of her beloved friend, where she felt that by occupying Esther’s room, sitting at her writing-desk, and using her very bed, she would enter into her spirit, and help to fill the vacant place in a mother’s heart. At first there was something hallowed in the home of one so pure,--she “felt it was holy ground,” and was “half afraid to live my common life here;” but the close association with sad memories was depressing, and the solitude, while it gave her rest, did not refresh her. After having formed a lifelong friendship with Franklin Carter, a half-brother of Esther and afterwards President of Williams College, she returned, first to Norton for a little while,--then to Beverly, where she secured time for her writing, which was now constantly absorbing her attention.