a small volume of Brewster’s on “Natural Magic,” which entertains me very much; but I am dreadfully cramped for time, and my poor mind goes like a half-tended garden, which every now and then makes me feel sad.

You would have been pleased, dear H——­, if you had heard Washington Irving’s answer to me the other day when, in talking with him of my profession and my distaste for it, I complained of the little leisure it left me for study and improving myself, for reading, writing, and the occupations that were congenial to me.  “Well,” he said, “you are living, you are seeing men and things, you are seeing the world, you are acquiring materials and heaping together observations and experience and wisdom, and by and by, when with fame you have acquired independence and retire from these labors, you will begin another and a brighter course with matured powers.  I know of no one whose life has such a promise in it as yours.”  Oh!  H——­, I almost felt hopeful while he spoke so to me....

[Alas! my kind friend was no prophet.  Not many months after, sitting by him at a dinner-party in New York, he said to me, “So I hear you are engaged to be married, and you are going to settle in this country.  Well, you will be told that this country is like your own, and that living in it is like living in England:  but do not believe it; it is no such thing, it is nothing of the sort; which need not prevent your being very happy here if you make the best of things as you find them.  Above all, whatever you do, don’t become a creaking door.”  “What’s that?” asked I, laughing.  He then told me that his friend Leslie, the painter, who was, I believe, like his contemporary and charming rival artist, Gilbert Stewart Newton, an American by birth, had married an Englishwoman, whom he had brought out to America, “but who,” said Irving, “worried and tormented his and her own life out with ceaseless complaints and comparisons, and was such a nuisance that I used to call her ‘the creaking door.’”]

Good-by, and God bless you, dearest H——.

I am affectionately yours,
FANNY KEMBLE.

BOSTON, Sunday, April 21, 1833. 
DEAR MRS. JAMESON,

There lies in my desk, and has lain, I am ashamed to say, for a long time now, an unanswered letter of yours, which smites my conscience every time I open that useful receptacle (desk, not conscience), where it has, I am sorry to say, many companions in its own predicament.  My time is like running water, and the quickest, but the rapids of Niagara, that ever ran, I think; and every hour, as it flies away, is filled with so much that must be done, letting alone so much that I would wish to do, that I am fairly out of breath, and feel as if I were flying myself in a whirling high wind, and if ever I stop for a moment, shan’t be surprised to find that I have gone crazy.  I think I should like to spend a few days entirely alone in a dark room, secluded