I
think, do all things, since it has dissipated that horrible image of the
burning steamer in which her husband perished, that was ever before her.
She is publishing his Memoirs, and, among other things, she read me some
patriotic songs which he wrote in Sand's time in Germany; they were in
the boldest tone of insurrection, and were, of course, proscribed and
suppressed. She had heard her husband occasionally hum a stanza or two
of them, and he had once written out a single one for her which she
found in her work-basket. This she transmitted to his mother in Germany,
and with this clue alone the mother obtained the rest; and eloquent
outbreakings they are of a spirit glowing with freedom and humanity....

I have passed lately a day at our State Lunatic Asylum. On my first
going there, in the evening the physician invited me into the
dancing-hall, where some sixty of the patients were assembled. The two
musicians were patients, one utterly _demented_, incapable of any
reasonable act except playing a tune on his violin, which he did with
accuracy. Except the doctor's children (as beautiful as cherubs, and
ministering angels they are), there were no sane persons among the
dancers. "There," said the physician, "is a homicide; there, a poor girl
who went crazy the day after her brother drowned himself, and who
fancies herself that brother; there, the King of England," etc. They
were all dancing with the utmost decorum and regularity. They attend
chapel on a Sunday without disturbance; they were all (among them
maniacs who had been for half a score of years chained in dungeons of
our common gaols) "clothed," and, if "not in their right mind,"
comfortable and cheerful; they _all_ had plants in their rooms and books
on their tables. Much depends on individual character, and the physician
is, as you would expect, a man of the highest moral power, and the very
embodiment of the spirit of benevolence, and if poetry and painting had
laid their heads together to give him a fitting form, they could have
done nothing better than nature has. My heart was ready to burst with
gratitude. Who can say the world does not move some forward steps?

CLARENDON HOTEL, November 6th, 1842.
DEAR GRANNY,

You know that it is now determined that we do not sail by the next
steamer....

Dearest Granny, do not you, any more than I do, reckon which love is
best worth having, of young or old love; for all love is _