A LETTER FROM MISS BREMER. 



You will understand this easily from what I have just 

 stated, and when you think of him, and look on these pages 

 where lie has written down his individual mind ; for if 

 ever writer incarnated his very nature in his work, truly 

 and entirely, it was done by A. J. Downing. And if his 

 words and works have won authority all over the United 

 States, wherever the mind of the people has risen to the 

 sphere of intelligence and beauty ; if under the snowy roofs 

 of Concord in the Pilgrim State, as under the orange and 

 oak groves of South Carolina, I heard the same words 

 " Mr. Downing has done much for this country ;" if even 

 in other countries I hear the same appreciation of his 

 works, and not a single contradiction ; it is that his peculiar 

 nature and talent were so one and whole, so in one gush 

 out of the hand of the Creator, that he won authority and 

 faith by the force of those primeval laws to which we 

 bow by a divine necessity as we recognize in them the mark 

 of divine truth. 



God had given to our friend to understand the true 

 beauty ; Christianity had elevated the moral standard of 

 his mind ; the spirit of the New World had breathed on him 

 its enlarging influence ; and so he became a judge of beau- 

 ty in a new sense. The beauty that he saw, that inspired 

 him, was no more the Venus Anadyomene of the heathen 

 world still living on through all ages, even in the Christian 

 one, mingling the false with the true and carrying abomi- 

 nations under her golden mantle. It was the Venus Ura- 

 nia, radiant with the pure glory of the Virgin, mother of 

 divinity on earth. The beauty that inspired him was in 

 accordance with all that was true and good, nor would he 

 ever see the first severed from the two others. It was the 

 beauty at home in the Kingdom of God. 



In Mr. Downing's home on the Hudson I was impressed 



