on
this has made upon our minds, or with what intense anxiety and suspense
we have been waiting for your letters from home. We were to have gone
South to-day, but linger here until to-morrow afternoon (having sent the
secretary and luggage forward) for one more chance of news. Love to dear
Macready, and to dear Mac, and every one we care for. It's useless to
speak of the dear children. It seems now as though we should never hear
of them. . . .

"P.S. Washington Irving is a _great_ fellow. We have laughed most
heartily together. He is just the man he ought to be. So is Doctor
Channing, with whom I have had an interesting correspondence since I
saw him last at Boston. Halleck is a merry little man. Bryant a sad one,
and very reserved. Washington Allston the painter (who wrote _Monaldi_)
is a fine specimen of a glorious old genius. Longfellow, whose volume of
poems I have got for you, is a frank accomplished man as well as a fine
writer, and will be in town 'next fall.' Tell Macready that I suspect
prices here must have rather altered since his time. I paid our
fortnight's bill here, last night. We have dined out every day (except
when I was laid up with a sore throat), and only had in all four bottles
of wine. The bill was 70_l._ English!!!

"You will see, by my other letter, how we have been feted and feasted;
and how there is war to the knife about the international copyright; and
how I _will_ speak about it, and decline to be put down. . . .

"Oh for news from home! I think of your letters so full of heart and
friendship, with perhaps a little scrawl of Charley's or Mamey's, lying
at the bottom of the deep sea; and am as full of sorrow as if they had
once been living creatures.--Well! they _may_ come, yet."

* * * * *

They did reach him, but not by the Caledonia. His fears as to that
vessel were but too well founded. On the very day when she was due in
Boston (the 18th of February) it was learned in London that she had
undergone misadventure; that, her decks having been swept and her rudder
torn away, though happily no lives were lost, she had returned disabled
to Cork; and that the Acadia, having received her passengers and mails,
was to sail with them from Liverpool next day.

Of the main subject of that letter written on the day preceding,--of the
quite unpremeditated impulse, out of which sprang his advocacy of claims
which he felt to be represented in his person,--of the injus