F. A. K.
Dearest H——,
I have received your letter, acknowledging my first to you.... As for letters, they are like everything else we experience here, sources of to the full as much suffering as satisfaction. Who has not felt their whole blood run backward at sight of one of these folded fate-bearers? I declare, breaking an envelope always has something of the character of pulling a shower-bath string over one's own head; I wonder anybody ever has the courage to do it....
Your dread of our finding New York quite a desert would have been literally fulfilled had we reached it a fortnight sooner; but the dreadful malady, the cholera, had taken its departure, and though private bereavements and general stagnation of business rendered the season a very unfavorable one for our experiment, yet, upon the whole, we have every reason to be well satisfied with the result of it, and think we did well not to postpone the beginning of our campaign.... The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me like the breaking asunder of some curious, beautiful, and mystical pattern or device.... All our lives long we are more or less intent on replacing the bright scattered fragments in their original shape: most of us die with the bits still scattered round us—that is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or soiled and defaced beyond recognition, in the life-process. The few very wise find and place them in a coherent form at last, but it is quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern from the original one.
The deaths of the young Napoleon, the Duke of Reichstadt, and Walter Scott have excited universal interest here, naturally of a very dissimilar kind. One's heart burns to think of that young eagle falling like a weakly winter flower, or a faded, sickly girl, into his untimely grave.... There was nothing for him but death. If he had been anything, it could only have been a wild spark of the mad meteor from which he sprang; and as Heaven in its wisdom forbade that, I think it much of its mercy that it extinguished him early and utterly, and did not leave him to flare and flicker and burn himself out with foul gunpowder smoke, and smell of dead men slain in battle, in the middle of the smoldering ashes of his father's European empire.
My admiration and respect for Walter Scott are unbounded, and were I the noblest, richest, and charmingest man in the world, I would lay myself at Anne Scott's feet out of sheer love and veneration for her father....
You ask me if I wrote anything on board ship? Nothing but odds and ends of doggerel. Since I have been here I have written some verses on the beautiful American autumn, which have been published with commendation. I am thinking of writing a prose story, if ever again I can get two minutes and a half of leisure.... Your entreaties for minute details of our life make me sad, for how little of what we do, be, or suffer can be conveyed to you in this miserable scrap of paper!... Our dinner-hour is three when we are actors, five when we are ladies and gentlemen. The food we get here in New York is very indifferent. It was excellent in quality in Philadelphia, but wherever we have been there is a want of niceness and refinement in the cooking and serving everything that is very disagreeable....
Thursday, Nov. 27th. This is my birthday—in England always one of the gloomiest days of this gloomy month; here my windows are all open, and the warm sun streaming in as it might on the finest of early September days with us. I am to-day three-and-twenty. Where is my life gone to? As the child said, "Where does the light go when the candle is out?" ... Since last I wrote to you I have been forty miles up the Hudson, and seen such noble waters and beautiful hills, such glory of color and magnificent breadth in the grand river and its autumn woods, as I cannot describe.
This is our last night but one of acting here. We play "The Hunchback" on Saturday, and on Monday go back to Philadelphia for three weeks; thence to Baltimore and Washington, and then return here. I must go now and rehearse Katharine and Petruchio.
I have just finished Graham's "History," and am beginning John Smith. By the by, a gentleman here is writing a play, in which I am to act Pocahontas and my father Captain Smith. Come out and see it, won't you? Good-by, dear. Think always of your affectionate