“You ask me to send you some verse.  I accordingly send you a scrap of recent manufacture, and you will observe that instead of forwarding my epic on Sevastopol, I select something that is fitter for these present vernal love days than the blaster of heroic verse:—­

“SONG.

    “Within the chambers of her breast
    Love lives and makes his spicy nest,
    Midst downy blooms and fragrant flowers,
    And there he dreams away the hours—­
      There let him rest! 
    Some time hence, when the cuckoo sings,
    I’ll come by night and bind his wings,—­
    Bind him that he shall not roam
    From his warm white virgin home.

    “Maiden of the summer season,
      Angel of the rosy time,
    Come, unless some graver reason
      Bid thee scorn my rhyme;
    Come from thy serener height,
    On a golden cloud descending,
    Come ere Love hath taken flight,
    And let thy stay be like the light,
    When its glory hath no ending
    In the Northern night!”

Now and then we get a glimpse of Thackeray in his letters.  In one of them he says:—­

“Thackeray came a few days ago and read one of his lectures at our house (that on George the Third), and we asked about a dozen persons to come and hear it, among the rest, your handsome countrywoman, Mrs. R——­ S——.  It was very pleasant, with that agreeable intermixture of tragedy and comedy that tells so well when judiciously managed.  He will not print them for some time to come, intending to read them at some of the principal places in England, and perhaps Scotland.

“What are you doing in America?  You are too happy and independent!  ‘O fortunatos Agricolas, sua si bona norint!’ I am not quite sure of my Latin (which is rusty from old age), but I am sure of the sentiment, which is that when people are too happy, they don’t know it, and so take to quarrelling to relieve the monotony of their blue sky.  Some of these days you will split your great kingdom in two, I suppose, and then—­

“My wife’s mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, is very ill, and we are apprehensive of a fatal result, which, in truth, the mere fact of her age (eighty-two or eighty-three) is enough to warrant.  Ah, this terrible age!  The young people, I dare say, think that we live too long.  Yet how short it is to look back on life!  Why, I saw the house the other day where I used to play with a wooden sword when I was five years old!  It cannot surely be eighty years ago!  What has occurred since?  Why, nothing that is worth putting down on paper.  A few nonsense verses, a flogging or two (richly deserved), and a few white-bait dinners, and the whole is reckoned up.  Let us begin again.” [Here he makes some big letters in a school-boy hand, which have a very pathetic look on the page.]

In a letter written in 1856 he gives me a graphic picture of sad times in India:—­