Heart.  But they told me, they would come back again the next year.

Head.  But in the mean time, see what you surfer:  and their return, too, depends on so many circumstances, that, if you had a grain of prudence, you would not count upon it.  Upon the whole, it is improbable, and therefore you should abandon the idea of ever seeing them again.

Heart.  May Heaven abandon me, if I do!

Head.  Very well.  Suppose, then, they come back.  They are to stay two months, and when these are expired, what is to follow?  Perhaps you flatter yourself they may come to America?

Heart.  God only knows what is to happen.  I see nothing impossible in that supposition:  and I see things wonderfully contrived sometimes to make us happy.  Where could they find such objects as in America, for the exercise of their enchanting art; especially the lady, who paints landscapes so inimitably?  She wants only subjects worthy of immortality, to render her pencil immortal.  The Falling Spring, the Cascade of Niagara, the Passage of the Potomac through the Blue Mountains, the Natural Bridge; it is worth a voyage across the Atlantic to see these objects; much more to paint, and make them, and thereby ourselves, known to all ages.  And our own dear Monticello; where has nature spread so rich a mantle under the eye?—­mountains, forests rocks, rivers.  With what majesty do we there ride above the storms!  How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! and the glorious sun when rising as if out of a distant water, lust gilding the tops of the mountains, and giving life to all nature! 1 hope in God, no circumstance may ever make either seek an asylum from grief!  With what sincere sympathy I would open every cell of my composition, to receive the effusion of their woes!

I would pour my tears into their wounds; and if a drop of balm could be found on the top of the Cordilleras, or at the remotest sources of the Missouri, I would go thither myself to seek and to bring it.  Deeply practised in the school of affliction, the human heart knows no joy which I have not lost, no sorrow of which I have not drank!  Fortune can present no grief of unknown form to me!  Who, then, can so softly bind up the wound of another, as he who has felt the same wound himself?  But Heaven forbid, they should ever know a sorrow!  Let us turn over another leaf, for this has distracted me.

Head.  Well.  Let us put this possibility to trial, then, on another point.  When you consider the character which is given of our country by the lying newspapers of London, and their credulous copyers in other countries; when you reflect, that all Europe is made to believe we are a lawless banditti, in a state of absolute anarchy, cutting one another’s throats, and plundering without distinction, how could you expect, that any reasonable creature would venture among us?