414 Landscape Gardening 



entertaining angels, or wrestling with demons, in the secret 

 chambers of his soul. There are passages in letters to his 

 wife which indicate, and they only by implication, that his 

 character was tried and tempered by struggles. Those 

 most intimate letters, however, are full of expressions of 

 religious faith and dependence, sometimes uttered with a 

 kind of clinging earnestness, as if he well knew the value of 

 the peace that passes understanding. But nothing of all 

 this appeared in his friendly intercourse with men. He had, 

 however, very few intimate friends among men. His warm- 

 est and most confiding friendships were with women. In 

 his intercourse with them, he revealed a rare and beautiful 

 sense of the uses of friendship, which united him very closely 

 to them. To men he was much more inaccessible. It can- 

 not be denied that the feeling of mystery in his character 

 affected the impression he made upon various persons. It 

 might be called as before, "haughtiness," "reserve," "cold- 

 ness," or "hardness," but it was quite the same thing. It 

 repelled many who were otherwise most strongly attracted 

 to him by his books. In others, still, it begot a slight dis- 

 trust, and suspicion of self-seeking upon his pprt. 



I remember a little circumstance, the impression of which 

 is strictly in accordance with my feeling of this singular 

 mystery in his character. We had one day been sitting in 

 the library, and he had told me his intention of building a 

 little study and working-room, adjoining the house: "but I 

 don't know," he said, "where or how to connect it with the 

 house." But I was very well convinced that he would 

 arrange it in the best possible manner, and was not surprised 

 when he afterward wrote me that he had made a door 

 through the wall of the library into the new building. This 

 door occupied just the space of one of the book-cases let into 

 the wall, and, by retaining the double doors of the book-case 

 precisely as they were, and putting false books behind the 

 glass of the doors, the appearance of the library was entirely 

 unaltered, while the whole apparent book-case, doors and 

 all, swung to and fro, at his will, as a private door. During 

 my next visit at his house, I was sitting very late at night in 



