Page:Poems Davidson.djvu/301

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BIOGRAPHY OF LUCRETIA MARIA DAVIDSON.
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during a visit to her sister the following year. She was at that time employed in writing her longest published poem, "Amir Khan." Immediately after breakfast she went.to walk; and not returning to dinner, nor even when the evening approached, Mr. Townsend set forth in search of her. He met her, and as her eye encountered his, she smiled and blushed, as if she felt conscious of having been a little ridiculous. She said she had called on a friend, and, having found her absent, had gone to her library, where she had been examining some volumes of an Encyclopedia to aid her, we believe, in the Oriental story she was employed upon. She forgot her dinner and her tea, and had remained reading, standing, and with her hat on, till the disappearance of daylight brought her to her senses. In the interval between her visits, she wrote several letters to her friends, which are chiefly interesting from the indications they afford of her social and affectionate spirit. We subjoin a few extracts. She had returned to Plattsburg amid the bustle of a Fourth of July celebration.

"We found," she says, "our brother Yankees had turned out well to celebrate the Fourth. The wharf, from the hill to the very edge of the water, even the rafts and sloops, were black with the crowd. If some very good genius, who presided over my destiny at that time, had not spread its protecting pinions around me, like everything else in 'my possession, I should have lost, even my precious self. What a truly lamentable accident it would have been just at that moment! We took a carriage, and were extricating ourselves