F. A. K.

STEAMBOAT ST. PATRICK, ON THE ST. LAWRENCE,
August 17, 1833. 
MY DEAREST H——­,

There is lying in my desk an unfinished letter to you, begun about a week ago, which is pausing for want of an opportunity to go on with it; but here I am, a prisoner in a steamboat, destined to pass the next four and twenty hours on the broad bosom of the St. Lawrence, and what can I do better than begin a fresh chapter to you, leaving the one already begun to be finished on my next holiday.  My holidays, indeed, are far from leisure time, for when I have nothing to do I have all the more to see; so that I am as busy and more weary than if I were working much harder.

We have been staying for the last fortnight in Quebec, and are now on our way back to Montreal, where we shall act a night or two, and then return to the United States, to New York and Boston....  The greater part of these poems of Tennyson’s which you have sent me we read together.  The greater part of them are very beautiful.  He seems to me to possess in a higher degree than any English poet, except, perhaps, Keats, the power of writing pictures.  “The Miller’s Daughter,” “The Lady of Shalott,” and even the shorter poems, “Mariana,” “Eleaenore,” are full of exquisite form and color; if he had but the mechanical knowledge of the art, I am convinced he would have been a great painter.  There are but one or two things in the volume which I don’t like.  “The little room with the two little white sofas,” I hate, though I can fancy perfectly well both the room and his feeling about it; but that sort of thing does not make good poetry, and lends itself temptingly to the making of good burlesque.

I have much to tell you, for in the last two months I have seen marvelous much.  I have seen Niagara.  I wish you had been there to see it with me.  However, Niagara will not cease falling; and you may, perhaps, at some future time, visit this country.  You must not expect any description of Niagara from me, because it is quite unspeakable, and, moreover, if it were not, it would still be quite unimaginable.  The circumstances under which I saw it I can tell you, but of the great cataract itself, what can be told except that it is water?

I confess the sight of it reminded me, with additional admiration, of Sir Charles Bagot’s daring denial of its existence; having failed to make his pilgrimage thither during his stay in the United States, he declared on his return to England that he had never been able to find it, that he didn’t believe there was any such thing, and that it was nothing but a bragging boast of the Americans.

At Albany, our first resting-place from New York, we had been joined by Mr. Trelawney, who had been introduced to me in New York, and turned out to be the well-known friend of Byron and Shelley, and author of “The Adventures of a Younger Son,” which is, indeed, said