She speaks also of the effect produced, as she fancied, upon
the minds of men by the eternal sound of the sea: a tendency to wear
away the edge of human thought and perception. But this was far from
being the case with regard to herself. Her eyesight was keener, her
speech more distinct, the lines of her thoughts more clearly defined,
her verse more strongly marked in its form, and the accuracy of her
memory more to be relied upon than was the case with almost any one of
her contemporaries. Her painting, too, upon porcelain possessed the
same character.
Her knowledge of the flowers, and especially of the seaweeds, with
which she decorated it, was so exact that she did not require the
originals before her vision. They were painted upon her mind's eye,
where every filament and every shade seemed to be recorded. These
green "growing things" had been the beloved companions of her
childhood, as they continued to be of her womanhood, and even to
reproduce their forms in painting was a delight to her. The written
descriptions of natural objects give her history a place among the
pages which possess a perennial existence. While White's "Selborne,"
and the pictures of Bewick, and Thoreau's "Walden," and the
"Autobiography of Richard Jefferies" endure, so long will "Among the
Isles of Shoals" hold its place with all lovers of nature. She says in
one place, "All the pictures over which I dream are set in this
framework of the sea, that sparkled and sang, or frowned and
threatened, in the ages that are gone as it does to-day.
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