friend) writes me word that Mrs. Martin (Helen Faucit, at whose persuasion it was acted) told him that it had gone off “better than she expected.”  Have you seen Alexander Smith’s book, which is all the rage just now?  I saw some extracts from his poems a year and a half ago, and the whole book is like a quantity of extracts put together without any sort of connection, a mass of powerful metaphor with scarce any lattice-work for the honeysuckles to climb upon.  Keats was too much like this; but then Keats was the first.  Now this book, admitting its merit in a certain way, is but the imitation of a school, and, in my mind, a bad school.  One such poem as that on the bust of Dante is worth a whole wilderness of these new writers, the very best of them.  Certainly nothing better than those two pages ever crossed the Atlantic.

God bless you, dear friend.  Say everything for me to dear Mr. and Mrs. W——­, to Dr. Holmes, to Dr. Parsons, to Mr. Whittier, (how powerful his new volume is!) to Mr. Stoddard, to Mrs. Sparks, to all my friends.

    Ever most affectionately yours, M.R.M.

I am writing on the 8th of May, but where is the May of the poets?  Half the morning yesterday it snowed, at night there was ice as thick as a shilling, and to-day it is absolutely as cold as Christmas.  Of course the leaves refuse to unfold, the nightingales can hardly be said to sing, even the hateful cuckoo holds his peace.  I am hoping to see dear Mr. Bennoch soon to supply some glow and warmth.

    Swallowfield, June 4, 1853.

I write at once, dearest friend, to acknowledge your most kind and welcome letter.  I am better than when I wrote last, and get out almost every day for a very slow and quiet drive round our lovely lanes; far more lovely than last year, since the foliage is quite as thick again, and all the flowery trees, aloes, laburnums, horse-chestnuts, acacias, honeysuckles, azalias, rhododendrons, hawthorns, are one mass of blossoms,—­literally the leaves are hardly visible, so that the color, whenever we come upon park, shrubbery, or plantation, is such as should be seen to be imagined.  In my long life I never knew such a season of flowers; so the wet winter and the cold spring have their compensation.  I get out in this way with Sam and K——­ and the baby, and it gives me exquisite pleasure, and if you were here the pleasure would be multiplied a thousand fold by your society; but I do not gain strength in the least.  Attempting to do a little more and take some young people to the gates of Whiteknights, which, without my presence, would be closed, proved too far and too rapid a movement, and for two days I could not stir for excessive soreness all over the body.  I am still lifted down stairs step by step, and it is an operation of such time (it takes half an hour to get me down that one flight of cottage stairs), such pain, such fatigue, and such difficulty, that, unless to get out in the