Letter from Elizabeth Stoddard to Julia C Dorr

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Letter written by Elizabeth Stoddard to Julia C. Dorr, dated February 7, 1892.

This is a scanned version of the original image in Special Collections and Archives at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vt.



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Feb 7th 1892 Dear Julia I waited before writing you to see if you would come - I meant to go by your card, but was not able - the cold weather freezes me - I made an attempt to go one day to certain places, dressed, got as far as 4th Avenue - and came home - Invitations are showered on us this winter, and they repose unheeded in their basket. I have not been well, but not sick enough to be confined to the house - but it helps my disinclination to go out. Besides mere society pleases me no longer. I have sent off my poems - in arranging them I found them more respectable than I thought. Mr Dick

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looked over them, and he thought better of them, they certainly are varied and not in the ordinary [such ?] You know what Stoddard for some time has said of your work - that you write better than ever. Your "fallow field" returns to me every now and then, it is charmingjust as clear and warm and dry as its dear old grasses are. I think in grace and spirit it may be entitled to sit in the seat behind Tennysons Talking Oak. What a disaster you have written. I know what a walk of misery it would be if Long should be so stricken - he is not well either just nowThis is a hard dark year, every body is dying, each has taken it into his

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head, that he is not to live long, he has lost all his cheerfulness - and with reason, in many ways - he calls himself a failure in life - Oh dear, dear - Nearly every word my father spoke in his last illness was "Oh dear, dear" - it was dreadful. If we spoke creation's truth, what else should we say but that all things end in doubt and misery. My father was a Biblical student, and tried to believe - he went farther and deeper than Colenso in Biblical errors, one winter with gout in his foot, he took up the New Testament and when I went to visit him he astounded me with its historical errors, and the confusion between the writers of the gospels. In his

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conclusion of all the results, he had nothing more to say than - "We dont know" - I have been reading Darwin's Life by his son, and he says - we dont know. There never was a nobler, more lovable man than Darwin, nor a greater one, take him as man, and man of science. I am inclined to believe he is the greatest light of the century - the book is very interesting. I wish you would write me how your nephew's case will go on - Was there no clue to the lung trouble no strain - it is very hard - Yours truly Elizabeth

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Old and Young FROM THE HEADLAND BY ELIZABETH STODDARD. I hear the waters of some inlet now, The storm-bent firs, and oaks along the cliff. The yellow leaves are glistening in the grass, The grassy slope I climb this autumn day. Insnaring me, the brambles clutch my feet, As if constraining me to be a guest To the wild, silent populace they shield. It cannot say, nor I, why we are here! What is my recompense upon this soil, - For other paths are mine, if I go hence, - Still must I make the mystery my quest? For here or there, I think, one sways my will. There is no show of beauty to delight The vision here, or strike the electric chord Which makes the present and the past as one. No thickets, where the thrushes sing in maze Of green, no silver-threaded waterfalls In vales, where summer sleeps in darkling woods With sunlit glades, and pools where lilies blow. Here, but the wiry grass, and sorrel beds, The gaping edges of the sand ravines, Whose shifting sides are tufted with dull herbs, Drooping above a brook, that sluggish creeps Down to the whispering rushes in the marsh. And this is all, until I reach the cliff, And on the headland's verge I stand, inthralled Before the gulf of the unquenchable sea - The sea, inexorable in its might, Circling the pebbly beach with limpid tides, Storming in bays whose margins fade in mist; Now blue and silent as a noonday sky, At twilight now the pearly rollers shake The sunset's trail of violet and gold; Or black, when rushing on the rocky isles Anchored in waves that bellow to the winds. I watch till comes the night; the moonlight falls, The silvery deep on some far journey goes, To solve for me, I think, this mystery!

NEW YORK CITY ["Independent" written on left side of page]

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