I was grateful to you then as a stranger, and I am not likely ever to forget it as a friend.

Believe this of me, as I feel it of _you_.
In the matter of reviews and of my last book, and before leaving the subject for ever, I want you distinctly to understand that my complaint related simply to the mistake in facts, and not to any mistake in opinion.

The quality of neither mercy nor justice should be strained in the honest reviewer by the personal motive; and, because you felt a regard for me, _that_ was no kind of reason why you should like my book.
In printing the poems, I well knew the storm of execration which would follow.

Your zephyr from the 'Athenaeum' was the first of it, gentle indeed in comparison with various gusts from other quarters.

All fair it was from your standpoint, to see me as a prophet without a head, or even as a woman in a shrewish temper, and if my husband had not been especially pained by my being held up at the end of a fork as the unnatural she-monster who had 'cursed' her own country (following the Holy Father), I should have left the '_mistake_' to right itself, without troubling the 'Athenaeum' office with the letter they would not insert.