I have a mission for war & fighting you know & now comes your turn for a blow up. If you can afford to spend an hour or two writing a letter we can afford to spend a franc or two to read it or to have you spend it for us. So be a little more careless about it and put the time you spend in thinking about it into thinking about something else & the time you spend in writing about it in writing about something else and at the end of the quarter send in your bill. There are not less than a dozen of us and twouldn’t be more than a shilling apiece if every letter came double postage because you didn’t leave out some one thought or fact & I have no doubt the collective thoughts and facts thus obtained quarterly, would be worth at least 1/6 apiece to us.

Don’t bother yourself so much about times and seasons; write when you conveniently can and feel like it and mail when it’s handy to do so. If the letter comes sooner than we expected of course it gives us unexpected pleasure and if [it) does not come so soon as we should like it, then we are all the gladder to get it when it does come. We have had but one letter from you since you got out that was not filled on the first page altogether, generally a part and sometimes the whole of the second, with explanations and apologies and reasonings and conjectures on these two topics, which, though Father may think it best to humor for the sake of giving you training in preciseness & economy, he is bored by, I venture to say, as much as any body else.

Recollect that Paris is no further from New York—Hartford, that [338] is—than Geneseo was when you were a child and Uncle Owen lived there, and that nobody has any more reason to be anxious about you than if you were at the Reverend Mrs. James Gordon Abbott’s in New York, & write what is pleasant and easy and beneficial to yourself and when it is easy and pleasant & most comfortable to yourself and don’t think anybody’s going into mourning if we don’t hear from you by a particular steamboat or that anybody will faint away if three letters come at once.

There’s no use in giving directions as to who shall and who shan’t read your letters; you ought to know that. If you particularly request that anyone shall not be shown to Mr. Smith, Father will be very careful to give it to him by mistake, that he may understand, as he will be sure to do, if he is not a goose, that you would like to correspond with him confidentially & knowing Father’s habits of mind have taken that way to tell him so without any impropriety. But as in this case he will of course be impudently mistaken, so you will be if you write any particular show letters. They are the very ones that will stick at Litchfield or that Tot will get to play great conflagration with and Mr. Smith will call and forget to ask whether you have been heard from lately, entirely from bashfulness; and just the time when you have missed three steamers running will be the time Mr. Smith will have accidentally noticed what steamers have been coming & will have, before he knows it, have asked what has been heard from you by them & Dr. Bushnell & Tom Beecher and Mrs. Dolly Ducklegs will be calling just after your last show letter, after having been saved three weeks for some such people, will have been dispatch’d to Litchfield for little Fanny to take the initiatory lessons in Lamplightology with, and when you haven’t been heard of for three weeks & when last heard from had just been invited by the Marquis of Chandos to attend a fete champetre and were debating whether you should accept because it would be Saturday & you were afraid you might not be back before sundown & wouldn’t be in a proper state of mind to put on clean linen for Sunday.

And by the way, don’t you begin to see yet that very few people, that are not very wicked people in other respects, ever drink wine or go to balls from bad motives? They go to enjoy themselves, but the essence of enjoyment is not selfish, it is in the opportunity of contributing and assisting to the enjoyment or pleasure of others. That is, after the first childish excitement of coming out is past.

Having cut off your right & left flanks, I don’t mind allowing that the body of your letters is very pretty reading & indicates a very charming, sensible young woman, who is under very good circumstances for her improvement & making a very good use of them. Descriptions of the old school and the scholars and the teachers and servants & hangers on—clear, vivid, and picturesque & truthful as Villette and a good deal more amiable and healthy. But the account of the present state and condition of the friend & chaperon was better than anything else, and so exactly described her, directly & incidentally, as to show [339] keener powers of insight into human nature & natural phenomena than the writer had before been suspected of.

Did you read the article a month or two since in the “Revue de deaux (meaning two (2)—I don’t know the exact orthography) Mondes,” on American women? Look it up. My impression is that none of those much flattered authoresses could have written so clever [a] picture of “Miss Stevens,” as yours. I jumped up & down 19 times and cracked the chimney of the lamp when I came to the result of her experience as an artist and good sense as a woman upon the vexed question of whether man (kind) is by nature a nocturnal or a dié-tetic animal.

Equally with her I have half burst the fetters of heathen custom; rising about the fifth hour of day light and devoting the intervening time till cheering night lights up her lamps to eating, drinking & getting ready. About 9 p.m. I get to work & between that & bedtime invariably accomplish much more than when rising before light I devote the day to labor. I protest against your unwarranted interferences with the sweet counsels of nature. Better drink cold tea than destroy genius—better waste the morning feu de (da di des) bois than burn the midnight oil in vain for want of nature’s restorative potion in proper place, time & dose. Take it easy & pursue your bent; that’s the great secret of mental health.

You are not so young as you think you are. Mary is of another sort and develops slowly and silently, people do not recognize her & therefore do not recognize you & you do not recognize yourself to be so old as you are. You are not a child but a particularly smart young woman and you are in danger of not taking those responsibilities upon yourself that belong to you.

I have lately received a phYSiological & philosophical principle that commends to my conviction—as consistent with my recollections of myself & others & of my every day observation very strongly—that reflection lays dormant while acquisition of data is made a business of. The acquisition of knowledge interferes with the development of wisdom. The learned scholars are always great fools (unless persons originally of quite extraordinary capacity). Be careful therefore not to carry childhood or the proper time for healthily receiving instruction so far on in life as to interfere with education, the drawing out of your private endowments. Don’t let women & men have the entire construction of your rules & motives & ideas, but let what God gave you in particular, have fair play.

Don’t let them shut you up much. German & French & dancing & music & History can very possibly be learned more rapidly, easily & perfectly at Paris than elsewhere, but they can be learned—& that well enough—in New York or Hartford or London or San Francisco. Therefore, what time and strength you can not give to other things in Paris, give to them. But there are other things to be attained and learned in Paris that are not to be anywhere but Paris, and there are certain things to be learned at Madame Le Duc’s that are [340] not to be anywhere else in Paris, and they are more valuable possibly than language or graces or anything to be obtained from professors or books on history. I suspect you have by this time got the best of them, so I will tell you as summer approaches do you insist upon going out. If Madame will not let you, cut your cable. Make sure that by some means or other you get out.

Emerson and J. R. Lowell have both been decrying the value of foreign travel; and if everybody travelled as they travelled and as nearly all do travel in these days, they were right. Shakespeare knew better and in his days it was impossible to travel as people do & will now. The great advantage of travel should be, that by it, habits of mind, which do not originate in the will & individual needs, wants and temperament, but in the warping & moulding effect of rigid circumstances, may be, and if it is best they should be, will be, if one please, warmed & melted away. Therefore keep home warm in your affections & your recollections, but not in your habits. And the great key to good in foreign travel is to place oneself in situations & circumstances, where one will be most liable to accidents. I don’t mean disagreeable accidents. To place oneself where (I mean) one does not know what to expect next. You want to learn French—the professor & book are valuable accessories but the accidental, incidental & unconscious method of receiving instruction, such as you have in a French family, is the best way to arrive quickly at perfection. You want to study the French; they are not to be understood by the study of their legislation & courts and theatres & newspapers but by seeing them incidentally, in the street, in the shops, in the families, through the window before you are up in the morning, in the bread and butter and eggs & milk they give you for your money. If there is no plaster in the bread; no hairs in the milk, if the eggs are fresh & cream rises on the milk, and for a proportionate measure of money you do not get these things so in New York, your respect for the French should rise & you should try to see what were the influences lying back of government, whether legal or of custom or in religion (that is to say, Theology, for religion is the same everywhere) that have caused it.

What traveller, what philosopher or historian can tell me or has told me, without evident falseness of bigotry, what effect, on the whole, the Democratic revolutions of the last hundred years have had on the minds of the French people at large. Who knows whether they have been benefitted or injured by them, elevated or debased in character; who gives me an opinion entitled to respect on the subject? No one—no one has leisure & the right kind of industry to enquire into that matter rightly. It is not to be ascertained in Paris or but partially there & with difficulty. Paris does not constitute France: the fact that it rules France & with travellers passes for France is a speaking one—affords a strong indication of what France is—that’s all.

But worse, Louis Napoleon & his Court, the Army, the officials, the police, the savants, the actors, the newspapers, the Diplomatique, the gentlemen & ladies that are able to hope to procure tickets to the Prefect’s ball, the men who keep the shops, the workmen & the gamins, the flower women & the [341] grisettes & the rest—all the interesting people do not begin to make up Paris. Add all your professors & esses, the servants & the omnibus drivers & conductors, the guides, commissionaires, washwomen, artists, doorkeepers, priests, nuns & performers and all you are likely to see while merely searching for pleasure or moving for business and convenience & you after all know very little, see very little of the people of Paris. A majority of the people of Paris are in back somewhere, or are the wives & children of the shop keepers & workmen & adventurers &c. How are you to see these & to learn by seeing them what is essentially good & essentially bad in Paris—for it is their habits and ideas & hopes and fears that will teach it to you, far more than all the rest.

You will learn it by accident—all you can do is to put yourself in the way of accidents. Strolling the streets without an object leads you unconsciously to it. Looking for nothing, cast your eyes down by accident & you will see gold. And this is not true of information alone. The best thoughts come to us unawares; not by study; that is, not directly by study. But if entirely without study, you will not have knowledge enough or strength enough to pick up the gold you stumble upon. But don’t let study be the end—only the means. Get provisions on board & use the charts others have prepared, but don’t neglect voyages of discovery yourself. It is in the streets & parks, on the bridges & in the omnibuses, in the placards and in the street cries, as much—ten times more—you are to learn as in the classes, at the theatre, in the newspapers & from the professors.

I want you by all means, also, if you can in any way accomplish it, to get out into the country, & when you are there try hard to put yourself in the way of having relations with something beside other ruralists merely; try to find (by accidents) what the real people of the country are—the men who are planting beets & thatching cottages and whittling sabots & the women who are tethering cows & carrying water and who go out whitewashing & cleaning house. You will never see much of such people when you try to, but you must travel or live or stroll or have Q passion for something else which incidentally, when you don’t expect, will bring you against such people.

The great accomplishment & acquirement or development of grace of endowment in yourself to be got in Paris above America is not language or manner or any sort of information, but appreciation of beauty and of excellence, more especially in fine arts. This you ought. to be in particularly good circumstances for—make the most of them. But the way to make the most is not to go to work methodically, unless indeed you find both the sense of beauty & the talent to reproduce it already unusually developed in you & you determine to become an artist. But the way is to go as often as you can without making it really tiresome to the Louvre—stroll through, look at the pictures, just as you feel like doing, without trying at all, for some time at any rate, to appreciate what you are told is best, but just trying to enjoy yourself in fact, trying or being careful that you don’t go so much & study & try to see beauty so much as to make it secretly a bore to you. What you want is to unconsciously & incidentally [342] cultivate your eye & the eye of your mind & heart. It will come when you don’t know it, this appreciation of excellence, never fear. Go occasionally to the Luxembourg & see the modern paintings. Go to Versailles (go there ten times at least before August.) You will be most pleased & interested with them probably for some time, but gradually you will see nearly all of them are poor trash and the old, dark, smokey, shadowy blotches of blues and browns & dull reds in the Louvre that at first you would not accept as presents if it were with the condition that you must have them hung up in your bedroom-they will have grown in some way attractive to you & when you begin to wonder in what way, then go to Sophy & ask her to go with you & tell you what she likes & why she likes it. Then read Ruskin & anything else you please-anything you can read on the general subject without boring yourself. The only thing that I saw in the Louvre that I would walk a mile to see again was Murillo’s Virgin. But half of it or more was shut off when I was there.

Make it a point, as often as it is not out of your way, to go past the antique statues, & as much as convenient when in the garden let your eyes rest on the casts—especially one of the serpent & lion or tiger which is superb & if you want to know what present to get for me, that’s it & whenever you find it in plaster or in bronze in miniature let me know & if I can cheat myself in any way I’ll put you in funds for it.

One other thing to be particularly acquired & cultivated in Paris—a delicate & refined taste (of the table) & the art of cooking. Ask yourself “what is it that makes this & that better than the nearest thing like it I am accustomed to” & get as much into the kitchens as you can.

Practice your eye also as much as you can make convenient by accident and also with intent, on architecture. Lounge about the (can’t remember the market place, quaint old carved domestic architecture) and about Notre Dame. And whenever you are approaching the Hotel de Ville keep your eye upon it—it is a delightful thing to remember—rather than upon the flower market & the washing boats & baths—Plenty of flowers in Hartford & washer-women and bathing tubs & seines, but nothing in America to help one’s growth in Beauty as the Hotel de V. (Hotel Devil we might well have punned on it once.)

Mrs. Cranch is a nice woman, very. I’d be glad to have you know her. They are very poor, very cultivated, very amiable & happy people. Tell Mr. Cranch you know me. Make much of Mr. Spring, too-the best hearted man in the world, but with no pertinacity of mind, only of soul. But cut the American world in Paris & see the French. Try to make French friends. Don’t be bashful or careful or cowardly, only modest.

My dear Mrs. Sophie Hitchcock

How-dy do? hope I see you [well]; much obleeged—quite smart considerin’ &c.

What I want to say to you is, wouldn’t it be a good thing for you to write for Putnam or Harper’s magazine? Fred Perkins is working editor of [343]

Putnam now & I suppose would be disposed to have you well paid for old acquaintance sake wouldn’t he? They usually pay $5 a page. Harper’s pay still better for a certain class of articles, as I judge from hints that have been given to me, & they are such articles as you could get up, I should think, if you once get the right idea, very easily. Harper is not quite so respectable as Putnam & I have always thought I wouldn’t write for it—so long as they constantly reprint articles from the English magazines & give no credit. But when such men as Ripley & Curtis—one the best critic & the other the most promising story teller in the country-are regularly occupied upon it, it does not become small people to stand on dignity.

What you want to do for Harper is to write some lively narratives or Life Sketches & send with them piquant illustrations—anything that is really new—new in Paris as well as here. I am sure you could strike some rich vein in Paris that has not been opened.

If you have seen Harper, you have seen, at times past, sketches in Paris, street & café sketches. They were not very good. I suppose Dick Tinto furnished them. They were not of narrative or continuous interest enough & the illustrations were too much in the Charivari style & that of the light French literature—looked too like copies not from nature but from other wood-cuts, & the writing was too spotty & there was too great an exertion to point a moral at frequent intervals.

The Porte Crayon sketches are nearer what are wanted, but are too affected & too evidently made for the purpose. The French country & country [344] town & Paris atelier stories in Household Words are the right sort of thing (and are delightful & interesting in themselves, aside from their market value.) Something in the style of the Philosophe sur le roof—translated as “the attic philosopher in Paris,” a bad translation of the title but capital of the book, would do. (And that also is most delightful reading & if you haven’t, get it for your own comfortation—good Sunday reading.)

Some of your earlier letters to the Tribune (were very good there &) would almost do, wanting incident and picturesque points for illustration. Your later letters in the Tribune were bad, strained and too interjectionary & affected a great deal. You are not successful in rhapsodies, which is perhaps strange. The letter on Rambouillet & the one on Dinner parties at M. Bossange’s was very good. But search for a voice of your own both in matter & style—for a single article or two or three—some sort of an account of your Pensionat—what you call it—I should think would do very well, with all its surroundings & historical reminiscences of Madame & some ghost stories & recollections of Gascony by the old nurse or cook & the going to Church & hither & thither & one thing & another, that might splice in handsomely to give variety and shadow & opportunity for illustration. For something of this sort that suited the market, & with cuts original & clever in style & subject, I have no doubt they would pay very handsomely.

It will do you good once in a month or two to spend a few days on such a thing as a vacation from your regular work. If you feel like making the trial, send to me & I will certainly get something done with it. If Harper should decline, as I don’t believe he would, I can at all events get it in the Times at $5 a column without the cuts—that at the worst, so it wouldn’t be absolutely wasted. Send a small instalment or sample to start with & let me try.