ice melts, the snow evaporates, the trees are clothed with green, the woods are full of flowers, and the whole world breaks out into a hallelujah of warmth, beauty, and blossoming like mid-July in our deliberate climate.  This again lasts, as it were, but a day; the sun presently becomes so powerful that the world withers away under the intense heat, the flowers and shrubs fade, and instead of screening and refreshing the earth, are themselves scorched and parched with the glaring fierceness of the sky; the ground cracks, the watercourses dry up, the rivers shrink in their beds, and every human creature that can flies from the lowlands and the cities to go up into the north or to the mountains to find breath, shelter, and refreshment from the sultry curse.  Then comes the autumn, and that is most glorious; not soft and sad as ours, but to the very threshold of winter bright, warm, lovely, and gorgeous.  Two seasons remain to our earthly year, remembrances, I think, of Paradise; the spring in Italy, and autumn in America....

You ask me how I “fit in” to my American audiences?  Why, very kindly indeed.  At first they seemed to me rather cold, and I felt this more with regard to my father than myself, but I think they have grown to like us; I certainly have grown to like them, and their applause satisfies me amply....  I heard yesterday of one of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s prints of me which was carried by a peddler beyond the Alleghany Mountains [the Alleghany Mountains then were further than the Rocky Mountains are now from the Atlantic seaboard], and bought at an egregious price by a young engineer, who with fifteen others went out there upon some railroad construction business, were bidding for it at auction in that wilderness, where they themselves were gazed at, as prodigies of strange civilization, by the half-savage inhabitants of the region.  That touched and pleased me very much....  We are going to act here till the 12th of this month, when we go to Boston, where we shall remain for a month; after which we return here for a week, and then proceed to Philadelphia by the 1st of June, where we intend closing our professional labors for the summer.  Thence we shall probably go to Niagara and the Canadas.  My father has talked of spending a little quiet time in Rhode Island, where the weather is cool and we might recruit a little; but there does not seem much certainty about our plans at present.  In the autumn we shall begin our progress toward New Orleans, where we shall probably winter, and act our way back here by the spring, when I hope and trust we shall return to England....  The book of Harriet Martineau’s which you bade me read is delightful.  I have not quite finished it yet, for I have scarcely any time at all for reading; for want of the habit of thinking and reading on such subjects I find the political economy a little stiff now and then, though the clearness and simplicity with which it is treated in this story are admirable.  I did not know that I was supposed to be the original of Letitia....  God bless you, my dearest H——.

I am ever your most affectionate,
F. A. K.