D
COUNTY OF NEW YORK, ESQ., TO THE DON ROBERTO WAGONERO, OF WASHINGTON,
_olim_, BUT _nunc_ OF NOWHEREINPARTICULAR.

If any person, O my Bobus, had foretold that all these months would go
by before I should again address you, he would have exhibited prescient
talent great enough to establish twenty "mediums" in a flourishing
cabalistic business. Alas! they have been to me months of fathomless
distress, immensurate and immeasurable sorrow, and blank, blind, idiotic
indifference, even to books and friends, which, next to the nearest and
dearest, are the world's most priceless possession. But now that I have
a little thrown off the stupor, now that kindly Time has a little balmed
my cruel wounds, I come back to my books and to you,--to the _animi
remissionem_ of Cicero,--to these gentle sympathizers and faithful
solacements,--to old studies and ancient pursuits. There is a Latin
line, I know not whose, but Swift was fond of quoting it,--

_"Vertiginosus, inops, surdus, male gratus amicis,"_--

which I have whispered to myself, with prophetic lips, in the long, long
watches of my lonesome nights. Do you remember--but who that has read
it does not?--that affecting letter, written upon the death of his
wife, by Sir James Mackintosh to Dr. Parr? "Such was she whom I have
lost; and I have lost her when her excellent natural sense was rapidly
improving, after eight years of struggle and distress had bound us fast
together and moulded our tempers to each other,--when a knowledge of
her worth had refined my youthful love into friendship, before age had
deprived it of much of its original ardor. I lost her, alas! (the choice
of my youth, and the partner of my misfortunes,) at a moment when I had
the prospect of her sharing my better days."

But if I am getting old, although perhaps prematurely, I must be casting
about for the _subsidia senectuti_. Swift wrote to Gay, that these
were "two or three servants about you and a convenient house"; justly
observing, that, "when a man grows hard to please, few people care
whether he be pleased or no"; and adding, sadly enough, "I should hardly
prevail to find one visitor, if I were not able to hire him with a
bottle of wine"; and so the sorrowful epistle concludes with the
sharpest grief of all: "My female friends, who could bear with me very
well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me." It is odd that Montaigne
should have hit upon the wine also as among the _subsidia senectuti_;
al