Before this letter reaches you, however, you will have returned to your castle, and your visit to Edinburgh will be over....  Mercy on me! what disputations you and Mr. Combe will have had—­on matters physiological, psychological, phrenological, and philosophical!  My brains ache to imagine them....  Spurzheim, you know, is dead lately in Boston.  It is a matter of regret to me not to have seen him, and his death will be a grief to the Combes, who venerate him highly....  Making trial of people is running a foolish risk, and they who get disappointment by it reap the most probable result from such experiments.  I am quite willing to trust my friends; God forbid I should ever try them!...

We have not yet been to Boston, and therefore I myself know nothing of Channing, and cannot answer your questions about him.  All that I hear inclines me to like as well as respect him.  His gentleness and kindness, his weak health, brought on by over-study, his perfect simplicity and unaffectedness—­these are the usual details that follow any mention of him, and accord with the impression his writings produced upon me; but of his theological treatises I know nothing.

I am glad anything so universal as the blessed sunshine reminds you of me, because my remembrance must be present with you almost daily.  The lights of heaven shine more glowingly here than through the misty veils that curtain our islands.  The moon and stars are wonderfully bright, and there is an intensity, an earnestness, and a translucent purity in the sky here that delights me....  Four months are already gone out of the two years we are to pass out of England.  Dear England!  My heart dwells with affectionate pride upon the beauty and greatness and goodness of my own country—­that wonderful little land, that mere morsel of earth as it seems on the map—­so full of power, of wealth, of intellectual vigor and moral worth!...

I found Graham a little too much of a Republican for me, though his “History” seemed to me upon the whole good and very impartial.  I am now half way through Smith’s “Virginia,” which pleases me by its quaint old-world style.  I am myself much inclined to be in love with Captain Smith.  A man who fights three Turks and carries their heads on his shield is to me an admirable man....

I answer the propositions in your letters in regular rotation as they come; and so, with regard to the peaches, those that I have tasted on this side of the Atlantic I should say were not comparable to fine hothouse peaches in England and fine French espalier peaches; but then the peach trees here are standard trees, and there are whole orchards of them.  Their chief merit, therefore, is their abundance, and some of that abundance is certainly fit for nothing but to feed pigs withal. [It is by no means a luxury to be despised, however, to have, in the American fashion,