How shall I thank you enough, dear and kind friend, for the copy of ——­ that arrived here yesterday!  Very like; only it wanted what that great painter, the sun, will never arrive at giving, the actual look of life which is the one great charm of the human countenance.  Strange that the very source of light should fail in giving that light of the face, the smile.  However, all that can be given by that branch of art has been given.  I never before saw so good a photographic portrait, and for one that gives more I must wait until John Lucas, or some American John Lucas, shall coax you into sitting.  I sent you, ten days ago, a batch of notes, and a most unworthy letter of thanks for one of your parcels of gift-books; and I write the rather now to tell you I am better than then, and hope to be in a still better plight before July or August, when a most welcome letter from Mr. Tuckerman has bidden us to expect you to officiate as Master of the Ceremonies to Mr. Hawthorne, who, welcome for himself, will be trebly welcome for such an introducer.

Now let me say how much I like De Quincey’s new volumes.  The “Wreck of a Household” shows great power of narrative, if he would but take the trouble to be right as to details; the least and lowest part of the art, that of interesting you in his people, he has.  And those “Last Days of Kant,” how affecting they are, and how thoroughly in every line and in every thought, agree with him or not, (and in all that relates to Napoleon I differ from him, as in his overestimate of Wordsworth and of Coleridge), one always feels how thoroughly and completely he is a gentleman as well as a great writer; and so much has that to do with my admiration, that I have come to tracing personal character in books almost as a test of literary merit:  Charles Boner’s “Chamois-Hunting,” for instance, owes a great part of its charm to the resolute truth of the writer, and a great drawback from the attraction of “My Novel” seems to me to be derived from the blase feeling, the unclean mind from whence it springs, felt most when trying after moralities.

Amongst your bounties I was much amused with the New York magazines, the curious turning up of a new claimant to the Louis-the-Seventeenth pretension amongst the Red Indians, and the rappings and pencil-writings of the new Spiritualists.  One should wonder most at the believers in these two branches of faith, if that particular class did not always seem to be provided most abundantly whenever a demand occurs.  Only think of Mrs. Browning giving the most unlimited credence to every “rapping” story which anybody can tell her!  Did I tell you that the work on which she is engaged is a fictitious autobiography in blank verse, the heroine a woman artist (I suppose singer or actress), and the tone intensely modern?  You will see that “Colombe’s Birthday” has been brought out at the Haymarket.  Mr. Chorley (Robert Browning’s most intimate