An Academic Courtship

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To read these letters of nearly sixty years ago, is to step into a sweeter and lovelier world than most of us have known, a day when Wellesley was small and young, when Harvard, too, was a grove of serenity. Such is the background — two quiet New England college towns in the summer, and the village of Boxford about thirty miles away. In the foreground are Alice Freeman and Professor George Herbert Palmer, two of the most prominent figures in American education during the nineteenth century. But they talk of their daily tasks only in asides; their letters reveal the beginning and growth of that all-absorbing devotion that made their married life the perfect experience it was. The delicacy of these love-letters has stood the test of time, and the beauty of the love they enshrine is as fresh as when they were penned. Strength, beauty, and happiness have preserved the fragrance of these flowers for our own generation.