We leave New York for Philadelphia after next week, and shall remain there three weeks.
I have read and noted much of your pretty book. There are one or two points which shall "serve for sweet discourses" in our time to come. I find great satisfaction in our discussions, for though I may not often confess to being convinced by your arguments in our differences (does any one ever do so?), I derive so much information from them, that they are as profitable as pleasant to me. Are you going to be busy with your pen soon again? Write me how the world is going on yonder, and believe me ever truly yours,
F. A. K.
New York, September 30, 1832.
Dearest H——,
... Perhaps, as you say, it is morbid to dwell as I do upon the unreality of acting, because its tangible reality makes its appearance duly every morning with the "returns" of the preceding night; but I am not sure that it is morbid to consider wants exaggerated and necessities unreal which render insufficient earnings that would be ample for any one's real need. A livelihood, of course, we could make in England.... You speak of all the various strange things I am to see, and the amount of knowledge I shall involuntarily acquire, by this residence in America; but you know I am what Dr. Johnson would have considered disgracefully "incurious," and the lazy intellectual indifference which induced me to live in London by the very spring of the fountain of knowledge without so much as stooping my lips to it, prevails with me here.
[Our house in Great Russell Street, which was the last at the corner of Montague Place, adjoined the British Museum, and has since been taken into, or removed for (I don't know which), the new buildings of that institution. Our friend Panizzi, the learned librarian, lived in the house that stood where ours, formerly my uncle's, did. While we were still living there, however, I was allowed a privileged entrance at all times to the library, and am ashamed to think how seldom I availed myself of so great a favor.]
Then, too, my profession occupies nearly the whole of my time; I have rehearsals every day, and act four times a week; my journalizing takes up a good deal of my leisure. Walking in the heat we still have here fatigues me and hurts my feet very much, especially when I have to stand at the theater all the evening. Although I have been here a month, I have seen but little either of places or people; the latter, you know, I nowhere affect, and my distaste for the society of strangers must, of course, interfere with my deriving information from them. Still, as you say, I must inevitably see and learn much that is new to me, and I take pleasure in the hope that when I return to you I shall be less distressingly ignorant than you must often have found me....
I am very sorry my brother Henry and his men are going to be sent upon so odious an errand as tithe-collecting must be in Ireland. I trust in God he may meet with no mischief while fulfilling his duty; I should be both to think of that comely-looking young thing bruised or broken, maimed or murdered. I hardly think your savage Irishers would have the heart to hurt him, he looks so like, what indeed he is, a mere boy; but then, to be sure, his errand is not one to recommend him to their mercy.
I have read Bryant's poetry, and like it very much. The general spirit of it is admirable; it is all wholesome poetry, and some of it is very beautiful.