Letter from GEORGE PERKINS MARSH to HIRAM POWERS, dated March 31, 1863.
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Dear Powers
I have owed you a letter for a good while, but I have really not had the heart to write to any one except as urgent business demands have from time to time impelled me. But I might as well wait for a river to run by as for good news from America. The same imbecility and vacillation in high places, the same treachery in our generals, the same stupid apathy in the people haunt us still, & I fear nothing but a dictatorship--for which we have not a man who is fit will save us.
Mrs Marsh spent the winter at Pegli near Genoa
very agreeably, but is not as
well as last year. We have now taken a country-house near Turin, but expect to have
a new home in town in a few months. I shall send you soon a second volume of
mine--the Eng. Lang. & Lit.--, which I don't
expect you to read. You can employ your time to better purpose. I have been for some
months engaged on still another book, some part of which may
interest you. It is on Physical Geography from a new point of view. I suppose it
will be printed this summer & I shall send it when it is out.
We have
had a very snowy winter, a real Vermont season, at Turin. I think the ground was
covered for more than two months; but it is now bare, & there are some signs
of spring. Have you a garden, & do you want some Lima beans, okra (gumbo) or
sweet corn? Say yes, & I will send you seed. We were much grieved to hear of
Florence's illness, which we hope has passed away before this. We hear a good
account of Luly, whom I may perhaps see when I go to England
in the summer to secure the copyright of my book.
As to politics &
war, Mrs Marsh says I am a bloody old owl, a croaker, a humbug & the like,
& that everything is going on finely. Well, well, I hope she is right. She
puts me in the wrong so often with her cheerful, hopeful temper, that I shan't mind
being caught in error once more, if good news ever come. I hope we may meet you
somehow before many months, though we cannot go to Tuscany this summer.
Yours very truly (including of course love from me & all mine to you & all yours)
Geo P Marsh
H Powers Esq
References in this letter:
Lectures on the English Language, 1860 (revised and enlarged edition 1861), and The Origin and History of the English Language and of the Early Literature It Embodies, 1862.
Man and Nature; or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, 1864.
Louisa Powers (1838-1929), Powers' eldest daughter, sat for her father in 1862 at the time of her marriage to A.B. Ibbotson. The marble replica was made from the plaster original in 1866 and shipped to the sitter's home in Sheffield, England. It is now in the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Va.