The girl’s sweet voice singing no more in the sunny, still noon, the grave, tender converse of the father and child charming no more the solemn eventide, the forsaken island dwells in my imagination as at once desecrated and hallowed by its mortal sojourners; no longer savage quite, and never to be civilized; the supernatural element disturbed, the human element withdrawn; a sad, beautiful place, stranger than any other in the world.  Perhaps the sea went over it; it has never been found since Shakespeare landed on it.  I love that poem beyond words....

I shall ruin you in postage; if there is any chance of that, keep
Mrs. Norton’s five guineas to pay for my American epistles.

Ever your affectionate
F. A. K.

DEAREST H——­,

I have received your letter, acknowledging my first to you....  As for letters, they are like everything else we experience here, sources of to the full as much suffering as satisfaction.  Who has not felt their whole blood run backward at sight of one of these folded fate-bearers?  I declare, breaking an envelope always has something of the character of pulling a shower-bath string over one’s own head; I wonder anybody ever has the courage to do it....

Your dread of our finding New York quite a desert would have been literally fulfilled had we reached it a fortnight sooner; but the dreadful malady, the cholera, had taken its departure, and though private bereavements and general stagnation of business rendered the season a very unfavorable one for our experiment, yet, upon the whole, we have every reason to be well satisfied with the result of it, and think we did well not to postpone the beginning of our campaign....  The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me like the breaking asunder of some curious, beautiful, and mystical pattern or device....  All our lives long we are more or less intent on replacing the bright scattered fragments in their original shape:  most of us die with the bits still scattered round us—­that is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or soiled and defaced beyond recognition, in the life-process.  The few very wise find and place them in a coherent form at last, but it is quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern from the original one.

The deaths of the young Napoleon, the Duke of Reichstadt, and Walter Scott have excited universal interest here, naturally of a very dissimilar kind.  One’s heart burns to think of that young eagle falling like a weakly winter flower, or a faded, sickly girl, into his untimely grave....  There was nothing for him but death.  If he had been anything, it could only have been a wild spark of the mad meteor from which he sprang; and as Heaven in its wisdom forbade that, I think it much of its mercy that it extinguished him early and utterly, and did not leave him to flare and flicker and burn himself out with foul gunpowder