Since your letter (a long time ago) I have written you a good many epistles (in a kind of invisible ink of my invention) which probably you have never received. The truth is, I am a distinguished case of total depravity in the matter of correspondence. Letters ought to flow from one as easily and spontaneously as spoken words. But then one must write all the time and report life continuously, as one does in speech. A letter does nothing but give some little detached morsel of one's life-and we say to ourselves what is the
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trees by the bank of a river, with a sunset seen through the branches, and reflected in the water.
The scene is remarkably like a similar one on Concord River, about two hundred yards below the spot where Hawthorne and Channing discovered the body of the schoolmistress who drowned herself, as Hawthorne supposed, from lack of sympathy.
It seems as if the original sketch must have been made at that point.
It is of a deep rich coloring, smoothly and delicately finished,--a painting that no one has yet been able to find fault with.
Rev. Samuel Longfellow, who knew almost every picture in the galleries of Europe, considered it equal to a Ruysdael, and he liked it better than a Ruysdael.
In the letter above referred to Cranch also writes:
1905. E. P. DUtton and Co. Boston,.
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