obliged to resign my Commissionership of Lunacy, not being able to bear the pain of travelling.  By this I lose about L900 a year.  I am, therefore, sufficiently poor, even for a poet.  Browning, as you know, has lost his wife.  He is coming with his little boy to live in England.  I rejoice at this, for I think that the English should live in England, especially in their youth, when people learn things that they never forget afterward.”

Near the close of 1864 he writes:—­

“Since I last heard from you, nothing except what is melancholy seems to have taken place.  You seem all busy killing each other in America.  Some friends of yours and several friends of mine have died.  Among the last I cannot help placing Nathaniel Hawthorne, for whom I had a sincere regard....  He was about your best prose writer, I think, and intermingled with his humor was a great deal of tenderness.  To die so soon!

“You are so easily affronted in America, if we (English) say anything about putting an end to your war, that I will not venture to hint at the subject.  Nevertheless, I wish that you were all at peace again, for your own sakes and for the sake of human nature.  I detest fighting now, although I was a great admirer of fighting in my youth.  My youth?  I wonder where it has gone.  It has left me with gray hairs and rheumatism, and plenty of (too many other) infirmities.  I stagger and stumble along, with almost seventy-six years on my head, upon failing limbs, which no longer enable me to walk half a mile.  I see a great deal, all behind me (the Past), but the prospect before me is not cheerful.  Sometimes I wish that I had tried harder for what is called Fame, but generally (as now) I care very little about it.  After all,—­unless one could be Shakespeare, which (clearly) is not an easy matter,—­of what value is a little puff of smoke from a review?  If we could settle permanently who is to be the Homer or Shakespeare of our time, it might be worth something; but we cannot.  Is it Jones, or Smith, or ——?  Alas!  I get short-sighted on this point, and cannot penetrate the impenetrable dark.  Make my remembrances acceptable to Longfellow, to Lowell, to Emerson, and to any one else who remembers me.

    “Yours, ever sincerely,

    “B.W.  PROCTER.”

And here are a few paragraphs from the last letter I ever received in Procter’s loving hand:—­

“Although I date this from Weymouth Street, yet I am writing 140 or 150 miles away from London.  Perhaps this temporary retreat from our great, noisy, turbulent city reminds me that I have been very unmindful of your letter, received long ago.  But I have been busy, and my writing now is not a simple matter, as it was fifty years ago.  I have great difficulty in forming the letters, and you would be surprised to learn with what labor this task is performed.  Then I have been incessantly occupied in writing (I