It was not didactic at all, but frank, spontaneous
and open to correction. She liked the most diverse writers; Tennyson,
and Dickens, and Browning. In early years I remember her speaking of
Hawthorne in a tone of veneration; but later in life she preferred
Emerson, even to Whittier. There was formerly a portrait of Goethe in
her parlor with Emerson's lines about him underneath it, copied in her
own picturesque hand-writing.
It seems strange that she never tried her hand at a novel, for of all
resorts on the coast the Isles of Shoals is the best ground to study
human nature on. People lose their artificial ways in that atmosphere
and their peculiarities are brought out distinctly, as oil brings out
the veins in black walnut. The epic gift, however, is very different
from the lyric and the two are not often united in the same person. Mrs.
Thaxter's prose writings are almost as rare as Whittier's. She published
a detailed account of a murder that was committed on Haley's Island
about twenty years ago;--what would seem to be a peculiar subject for a
cultivated person to fasten on--and yet she succeeded in giving it a
good deal of dignity. One consequence of this has been that hundreds of
people cross over every summer to Smutty Nose to stare at the miserable
old shanty where the event took place, though there is absolutely
nothing to be seen there.
It was a choice occasion in the old Shoals days when Mrs.
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