let us be generous and give a few copies away.  Indeed, such is my weakness, that I would sometimes rather give than sell.  In the present instance you will do me the kindness to send a copy each to Mr. Charles Sumner, Mr. Hillard, Mr. Norton:  but no—­my wife requests to be the donor to Mr. Norton, so you must, if you please, write his name in the first leaf and state that it comes from ‘Mrs.  Procter.’  I liked him very much when I met him in London, and I should wish him to be reminded of his English acquaintance.

“I am writing to you at eleven o’clock at night, after a long and busy day, and I write now rather than wait for a little inspiration, because the mail, I believe, starts to-morrow.  The unwilling Minerva is at my elbow, and I feel that every sentence I write, were it pounded ten times in a mortar, would come out again unleavened and heavy.  Braying some people in a mortar, you know, is but a weary and unprofitable process.

“You speak of London as a delightful place.  I don’t know how it may be in the white-bait season, but at present it is foggy, rainy, cold, dull.  Half of us are unwell and the other half dissatisfied.  Some are apprehensive of an invasion,—­not an impossible event; some writing odes to the Duke of Wellington; and I am putting my good friend to sleep with the flattest prose that ever dropped from an English pen.  I wish that it were better; I wish that it were even worse; but it is the most undeniable twaddle.  I must go to bed, and invoke the Muses in the morning.  At present, I cannot touch one of their petticoats.

“A SLEEPY SONG.

“Sing! sing me to sleep! 
With gentle words, in some sweet slumberous measure,
Such as lone poet on some shady steep
Sings to the silence in his noonday leisure.

“Sing! as the river sings,
When gently it flows between soft banks of flowers,
And the bee murmurs, and the cuckoo brings
His faint May music, ’tween the golden showers.

    “Sing!  O divinest tone! 
      I sink beneath some wizard’s charming wand;
    I yield, I move, by soothing breezes blown,
      O’er twilight shores, into the Dreaming Land!

    “I read the above to you when you were in London.  It will appear in
    an Annual edited by Miss Power (Lady Blessington’s niece).

    “Friday Morning.

“The wind blowing down the chimney; the rain sprinkling my windows.  The English Apollo hides his head—­you can scarcely see him on the ‘misty mountain-tops’ (those brick ones which you remember in Portland Place).

“My friend Thackeray is gone to America, and I hope is, by this time, in the United States.  He goes to New York, and afterward I suppose (but I don’t know) to Boston and Philadelphia.  Have you seen Esmond?  There are parts of it charmingly written.  His pathos is to me very touching.  I believe