entertains of her future development. He is fresh and vigorous, and has a pleasure in communicating his thoughts. And although his English is every now and then the most wonderful gihberish that ever was heard, yet his thoughts find their way through it, and by it, and sometimes in a brilliant manner. Thus, for example: last evening, when characterising the faults and the merits of Macaulay's historical work, this was so striking as to cause the otherwise undemonstrative Mr. Downing to exclaim repeatedly, “Excellent! delightful!”
Mr. Downing was interested by Bergfalk in a high degree, and invited him to spend the night there; but he had already engaged rooms in the town. We accompanied him to his inn; and I gave him Lowell's and Emerson's works to bear him company.
To-day, Sunday the 21st, as I continue my letter, Bergfalk is again here, and with him a Swedish doctor, Uddenberg, living at Barthelemi, and who came to pay his respects to me. The morning has been intellectually rich to me in a conversation on Lowell's poem of “Prometheus;” and the manner in which an American poet has treated this primeval subject of all ages and all poets. Bergfalk again distinguished himself by his power of discriminating the characteristics of the subjects; and nothing like this is ever thrown away upon Mr. Downing. At my request he read that fine portion of Prometheus's defiance of the old tyrants, in which the poet of the New World properly stands forth in opposition to those of the Old World, because it is not, as in the Prometheus of Æschylus, the joy of hatred and revenge, in the consciousness that the power of the tyrant will one day come to an end; nor as in Shelley, merely the spirit of defiance, which will not yield, which knows itself to be mightier than Zeus in the strength of suffering and of will,—no: it is not a selfish joy which gives power to the newly-created Prometheus; it is the certainty which defies the
