Ruler of the spirits.”  My eyes ache with the incessant glare, and I must close my letter, for it is past eleven o’clock, and I have to rehearse to-morrow morning....  I have seen Mr. Wallack since our arrival, whom I never saw in England, either on or off the stage.  I went the other night to see him in one of his favorite pieces, “The Rent-Day,” which made me cry dreadfully, but chiefly, I believe, because, when they are ruined, he asks his wife if she will go with him to America.  You see I am taking to play-going in my old age.  The theater is very pretty, of the best possible dimensions for me, and tolerably good for the voice.  We leave this place for Philadelphia on the 10th of October, and remain there a fortnight, and then go on to Boston....

Last Thursday we crossed the Hudson in one of the steamers constantly plying between the opposite shores and New York, and took a delightful walk along the New Jersey shore to a place called Hoboken, famous once as a dueling-ground, now the favorite resort of a pacific society of bon vivants, who meet once a week to eat turtle, or, as it is expressed on their cards of invitation, for “spoon exercise.”  The distance from our landing-point to the place where these meetings are held is about five miles, a charming walk through a strip of forest-ground, which crowns the banks of the river, gradually rising to a considerable height above it.  We were delighted with the vivid, various, and strange foliage of the trees, the magnificent river, broad and blue as a lake, with its high and richly wooded shore, and the sparkling, glittering town opposite.  We looked down to the Narrows, the defile through which the waters of this noble estuary reach the Atlantic, and between whose rocky walls two or three ships stood out against the brilliant sky.  The ebbing tide plashed on the rocks far below us, and the warm grass through which we walked was alive with grasshoppers, whose scarlet wings, suddenly unfolded when they flew, made me take them for some strange species of butterfly.  It was all indescribably bright and joyous-looking, and the air of a transparent clearness that was one of the most striking characteristics of the whole scene, and one of the most delightful.... [In discussing the relative merits of England and America, Dr. Channing once said to me, “The earth is yours, but the heavens are ours;” and I quite agree with him.  I have never seen a sky comparable, for splendor of color or translucent purity, to that of the Northern States.]

I have been reading your favorite book, “Salmonia.” ...  I am rather surprised at your liking it so very much, because, though the descriptions are beautiful, and the natural history interesting, and the philosophical and moral reflections scattered through it delightful, yet there is so much that is purely technical about fishing and its processes, and addressed only to the hook-and-line fraternity, that I should