Transcript
Nahant near Boston.
Sunday.
Dearest Hyacinth *1
This is my last letter to you from America, I am glad to say, for I am wearying to be home and with you. I have still nearly a week's work with Dr Gray*2, who is indefatigably helping me with my collections. Yesterday I came here to spend Sunday at the invitation of a Mr Russell,*3 a great friend of Dr Playfair's*4, who sent me a cordial invitation, and as I thought that it would be only right to relieve the Grays of my company for a night, I accepted it.
Nahant is on a rocky spit of land that projects into Boston Harbour, and is entirely occupied by houses of wealthy Bostonians who spend the summer here. Agassiz*5, Mottley*6, Emerson*7, Longfellow*8, &c., have had or have houses here in which they spend more or less of the summer months, and I need not say that the Society is highly intellectual. I return to Dr Gray's early tomorrow morning. Mr Russell is a retired man of business, has a wife and two daughters, very good looking girls, and nothing can exceed their kindness and attention - but this I may say of all Americans. I have been driving and walking about with them all day. There is but one church, now shut up for the season, as the families are all leaving. Service is held in it every Sunday by different preachers; Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Unitarians, turn about, are invited to take a Sunday and are well paid for it. The young Ladies of the place make the choir and perform for all the services, and the people attend all. Playfair calls it
Nahant near Boston.
Sunday.
Dearest Hyacinth *1
This is my last letter to you from America, I am glad to say, for I am wearying to be home and with you. I have still nearly a week's work with Dr Gray*2, who is indefatigably helping me with my collections. Yesterday I came here to spend Sunday at the invitation of a Mr Russell,*3 a great friend of Dr Playfair's*4, who sent me a cordial invitation, and as I thought that it would be only right to relieve the Grays of my company for a night, I accepted it.
Nahant is on a rocky spit of land that projects into Boston Harbour, and is entirely occupied by houses of wealthy Bostonians who spend the summer here. Agassiz*5, Mottley*6, Emerson*7, Longfellow*8, &c., have had or have houses here in which they spend more or less of the summer months, and I need not say that the Society is highly intellectual. I return to Dr Gray's early tomorrow morning. Mr Russell is a retired man of business, has a wife and two daughters, very good looking girls, and nothing can exceed their kindness and attention - but this I may say of all Americans. I have been driving and walking about with them all day. There is but one church, now shut up for the season, as the families are all leaving. Service is held in it every Sunday by different preachers; Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Unitarians, turn about, are invited to take a Sunday and are well paid for it. The young Ladies of the place make the choir and perform for all the services, and the people attend all. Playfair calls it
“the Church of all the Gods", which rather scandalizes the good people here, where liberality in religious matters is above all things prosaic.
You will be glad to hear that Sir David Wedderburn*9 and his brother have taken passages in the Marathon, so I shall have pleasant companions, but I hear that she is a very slow boat. They have given me a whole State cabin to myself.
Everybody here is so anxious to see you and asks for your photograph, so you must really get some taken at once. They make me promise to bring you out and see the Eastern States, which I think are ten thousand times better worth seeing than the Western ones.
Thanks dear for your long letter of the .... which sends me such full and good accounts of the children. I hope that the measles have left no ill effects on Gracie*10, and that Reggie's*11 health is restored.- also that Brian*12 takes to Science.
Mr Mottley, brother of the late Historian, dined with us today, a very agreeable man who has spent much tome[sic] in Europe and passed last winter with his family at Cannes, at the Hotel Bellevue. Yesterday I dined at a small dining Club of which Dr Gray is a member and met Mr. Adams*13 whom we knew as American Minister in England years ago, Story the Sculptor*14, Emerson*7, Mr Elliot*15, President of Cambridge University, and many eminent and agreeable men, several of whom had called on me at Kew.
The leaves are beginning to change color here and I shall see just the beginning of the Autumn tints before I leave. The
weather has been splendid hitherto.
I am so glad to hear good news of Howell *16 and of your cousin in India. With love to you, parents, and kindest regards to Hereford,
Ever your devoted husband, | J.D.Hooker.
1. Lady Hyacinth Hooker, née Symonds then Jardine (1842--1921). Joseph Hooker's second wife; they married in 1876 and had two sons.
2. Asa Gray (1810--1888). Considered the most important American botanist of the 19th century, he was instrumental in unifying the taxonomic knowledge of the plants of North America.
3. Not known
4. Dr. Playfair. Probably Robert Lambert Playfair (1828 – 1899). Soldier and naturalist, he was in the Indian Political Service before becoming Consul-General of Algeria. He corresponded with J. Hooker during the time Hooker was Director of Kew.
5. Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807--1873). Swiss-American biologist and geologist. After visiting Harvard University mid-career, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1847 and became a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, head of its Lawrence Scientific School, and founded its Museum of Comparative Zoology. His reputation has suffered from the evidence of his resistance to Darwinian evolution, and his later writings on human polygenism.
6. John Motley (1822--1859), mining engineer in South Wales, Malaysia and Borneo, with an active interest in natural history, corresponding with W.J. Hooker and other botanists and geologists, and contributing specimens to a number of institutions. He and his family died in an uprising at the start of the Bandjermasin War in S.E. Borneo.
7. Probably George Barrell Emerson (1797-1881). President of the Boston Society of Natural History. Widely researched the trees of Massachusetts. He collaborated with Asa Gray when composing a key for his published works.
8. Could this be the American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882)
9. Not known
10. Grace Ellen Hooker (1868--1953). Joseph Hooker's daughter by his first wife Frances Hooker née Henslow
11. Reginald Hawthorn Hooker (1867--1944). Civil servant, statistician & meteorologist. He was the fourth son of Joseph Dalton Hooker and Frances Henslow.
12. Brian Harvey Hodgson Hooker (1860--1932). Fifth child, third son of Joseph and Frances Hooker
13. Probably Charles Francis Adams Sr. (August 18, 1807 – November 21, 1886) was an American historical editor, writer, politician, and diplomat. Adams served as the United States Minister to the United Kingdom 1861-1868.
14. Not known
15.Probably Charles William Eliot (March 20, 1834 – August 22, 1926) was an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869.(Cambridge, Massachusetts)
16. Possibly Thomas Howell (1842-1912). A self-taught botanist who, in 1877, at the age of thirty-five, published a twenty-two-page Catalogue of the Flora of Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Because he could not sell unnamed specimens, he sent his plants to eastern botanical experts such as Asa Gray, Sereno Watson, and Liberty Hyde Bailey for identification.
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