d to your former
determination, you have withdrawn yourself from your own blaze, and
left England to profit by its light. Of myself I can tell you little
that is particularly cheerful....

The friends of good order, in this excellent city of brotherly love,
have been burning down a large new building erected for _purposes of
free discussion_, because Abolition meetings were being held in it; and
the Southern steamer has been wrecked with dreadful loss of life, owing
to the exceeding small esteem in which its officers appear to have held
that "quintessence of dust, Man." The vessel was laden with Southerners,
coming north for the summer; and I suppose there is scarcely a family
from Virginia to Florida, that is not in some way touched by this
dreadful and wanton waste of life.

Pray, when you have time, write me some word of your doing, being, and
suffering, and

Believe me ever yours truly,
F. A. B.

[The above mention of shipwreck, refers to the disastrous loss of
the _Pulaski_; an event, the horror of which was rendered more
memorable to me by an episode of noble courage, of which our
neighbor, Mr. James Cooper, of Georgia, was the hero, and of which I
have spoken in the journal I kept during my residence on our
plantation.]

ROCKAWAY, Friday, August 10th.

Where are you, my dearest Harriet; and what are you doing? Drinking of
queer-tasting waters, and soaking in queer-smelling ones? Are you
becoming saturated with sulphur, or penetrated with iron? Are you
chilling your inside with draughts from some unfathomable well, or
warming your outside with baths from some ready-boiled spring?

Oh! vainest quest of that torment, the love for the absent! Do you know,
Harriet, that I have more than once seriously thought of never writing
any more to any of my friends? the total cessation of intercourse would
soon cause the acutest vividness of feeling to subside, and become blunt
(for so are we made): the fruitless feeling after, the vain eager
pursuit in thought of those whose very existence may actually have
ceased, is such a wearisome pain! This being linked by invisible chains
to the remote ends of the earth, and constantly feeling the strain of
the distance upon one's heart,--this sort of death in life, for you are
all so far away that you are almost as _bad_