Chapter XXVI: Part 26

Pray now, my dearest friend, consider that you too often challenge with affectionate anxiety for me that future which I may never live to see; and yet do not imagine that I consider your apprehensions and suggestions, were they a thousand times more numerous and more ridiculous, if that were possible, as in any way unsatisfactory; but highly the contrary, as testifying to that most comfortable fact that you, my beloved Hal, are the very same you ever have been to me, an excellent, precious, devoted, wise, most absurd, and every way invaluable friend. God bless you.

Ever yours,
FANNY.

GREENOCK, October 9th.

I am very glad I did the duty of a hostess, dear Hal, though only in your dreams, and received you hospitably in my own house, though I was not conscious of it. As for that fool Mulliner and that brute Jeffreys, I will hang them up together on one rope when I return, for allowing you to be so horribly disturbed....

If we are in Orchard Street together again, you shall put the Psyche [a fine cast of the Neapolitan truncated statue given to Mr. Hamilton, Mrs. Fitzhugh's brother, by the King of Naples] in whatever light you please; but, as I am certain not to return to London till the third week in November, if then, I feel as if, when I get back to Orchard Street, I should have nothing to do but pack up my things preparatory to removing to King Street, where I hope to get Mrs. Humphreys to receive me until I leave England.

I shall certainly not be six weeks in Orchard Street when I return, and the Psyche will desert the drawing-room when I do, and resume her post on the staircase, where she always seemed to me to look down on dear Mrs. Fitzhugh's morning visitors, as they came up the stairs, with a divinely mild severity of expression, as if she felt the bore about to be inflicted by their presence on the inmates of her house, the mortals under her heavenly care.

You ought to find two letters from me at Bannisters, for I have directed two to you there. How I wish I could be with you and dear Emily! Give my love to her, and believe me

Ever yours,
FANNY.

[I was at this time occupying my friend Mrs. Fitzhugh's house in
Orchard Street, Portman Square, which I rented for a twelvemonth
from her. It was a convenient small house in an excellent situation,
and one whole side of the drawing-room was covered with a clever
painting, by Mr. Fitzhugh, of the bay and city of Naples--a pleasant
object of contemplation in London winter days.]

GLASGOW, October 12th.
MY DEAREST HAL,

I should very much wish that you would give me one of Loyal's children [a fine Irish retriever of my friend's]; but do not again end any letter to me so abruptly, without even signing your name, because it gives me a most uncomfortable notion that I have not got all you have written, that you have, by mistake, put only a part of your letter in your envelope, and so sent it off unfinished to me.

I left Carolside, to my great regret, yesterday. I came in Mrs. Mitchell's carriage to within fourteen miles of Edinburgh, where I joined the railroad. She accompanied me thus far, and then returned home. At Edinburgh I transferred myself immediately to the Glasgow train, and so came on, without being able to ascertain whether Cecilia Combe and Lizzie Mair are at home or not.

Mrs. Mitchell and Lady M----, and a party of their friends, are coming to Glasgow to-morrow. They will stay at the same inn where I am, and go to the theatre every night that I play, so that I do not feel yet as if I had taken leave of them; and Lady M---- intends going on with me to Dundee, where I am going to act when I have finished my engagement here and at Greenock.

Is it not too provoking that the York manager has at length found out that he can afford to give me my terms, and now writes to me to beg that I will go and act in York at the beginning of next month? which, of course, I cannot, as I am to be three weeks in Edinburgh before I return to England.

Neither you nor Dorothy mention your winter plans. Have you none made yet?...

I do not think, dear Hal, that you have ever heard me express a positive rejection of phrenology, for the simple reason that, never having taken the pains thoroughly to study it, it would ill become me to do so. At the same time, you know, I have at various times lived much in the society of the principal professors of the science in this country, and they have occasionally taken pains to explain a good deal of their system to me. I have also read a good many of their books, and have had a great personal affection and esteem both for Mr. Combe and his excellent brother. But, in spite of all this, and my entire agreement with almost all their physiological doctrines, phrenology, as I have hitherto seen and heard it, has a positive element of inconclusiveness to me, and I doubt if by studying it I should arrive at any other opinion, since all the opportunities I have enjoyed of hearing it discussed and seeing it acted upon have left my mind in this frame regarding it. I believe myself to have no prejudice on this subject, for I have longed all my life to know something positive and certain about this wonderful machine which we carry about with us, or which carries us about with it, and incline to agree with the views which the phrenological physiologists entertain on the subjects of temperament and general organization. But, in spite of all this, phrenology, as I hear it perpetually referred to and mixed up by them with their habitual speech (it forms indeed so completely the staple of their phraseology that one had need be familiar with the terms to follow their usual conversation), produces no conviction on my mind beyond the recognized fact that a nobly and beautifully proportioned head indicates certain qualities in the human individual, and _vice versa_.

It appears to me merely a new nomenclature for long-known and admitted phenomena; and beyond those, they seem to me to involve themselves in contradictions, divisions, and subdivisions of the brain, so minute and various, and requiring so much allowance for so many conditions, as considerably to neutralize each other, and render the result of their observations, which to them seems positive and conclusive, to me uncertain and unsatisfactory.

There are many things which my intellectual laziness prevents my examining, which I feel sure, if I did examine, would produce positive results on my mind; but phrenology does not seem to me one of these. If it had been, I should have adopted it, or felt the same sort of belief in it that I do in mesmerism, about which, understanding nothing, I still cannot resist an impression that it is a real and powerful physical agency.... Now you must draw your own conclusions as to the causes of this state of mind of mine with regard to phrenology. The phrenologists, you know, say I am deficient in "causality"--and undoubtedly it is not my predominant mental quality; but I incline to think that I _could_ think, as well as the average number of professing phrenologists, if I would take the trouble, for I have known some amongst them who certainly were anything but logical in their general use of their brains.

The only time I ever was in the Highlands was when I went with Dall and my father to Loch Lomond twenty years ago. I had never seen a drop of Loch Katrine till now. We went from Glasgow to Stirling by railroad in an hour, on Saturday morning. From Stirling we took a light open carriage, a kind of britzska, and pair of horses, and posted the same afternoon sixteen miles to Callander, where we slept. Sunday morning we took the same carriage with fresh horses to Loch Katrine. The distance is only ten miles of an enchanting drive; and if I had been able to spend the night at the Trosachs, I could have done it perfectly well, for there is an immense big inn there for the reception of tourists; and though the house was shut up for the season, the servants were in it, and we could have procured bed and board there, and I have no doubt a roast fowl and sherry, or oatmeal and whiskey, if we had preferred them. I had, however, to be back in Stirling the same afternoon, and the weather was wild and gloomy, though not cold, nor positively wet till we got into a little one-horse "machine" to drive through the Trosachs, when the mist shrouded the mountains almost from base to summit, and even Ben Aven, close under him as we were, was barely discernible. Ben An was the feature of the scene that struck me most; the form of its crest is so singularly jagged and fine.

We just drove through the pass to the first ripple of the lake, and then turned right-about to Stirling, which we reached before four o'clock in the afternoon, and yesterday morning I was back again in Glasgow, the lakes and mountains remaining in my memory absolutely like a dream. The country from Doune to Callander is beautiful, and in summer it must be an enchanting expedition, though such scenery has its own peculiar winter beauty, grander and more impressive perhaps than even its summer loveliness. I wish I was there again.

I cannot tell you anything more of my receipts at Glasgow, except that those of the second night were much better than the first; but as those were small, this is not saying much. I have not yet received the "returns."

I am glad the news you got from Ardgillan is satisfactory. Love to dear Dorothy.

Ever as ever yours,
FANNY.

29, ABERCROMBIE PLACE, EDINBURGH, Wednesday, 13th.

I did not see the eclipse, my dear. I did not know there was to be one, and did not therefore look for it; and if I had, I doubt my having been any the wiser, inasmuch as our mornings of late have been very misty.

I am off to-day with Mrs. Mitchell to Ardoch, where I stay only to-morrow, and return Friday to act here on Saturday. Having promised to go, I do not like to break my word, otherwise it seems to me rather a fuss, and a long way to go for one day's rest. Originally our plan was to spend two or three days there, that being all I could then give; but Mrs. Mitchell, with whom I had promised to go, could not get away from visitors at her own house sooner.

I spent the evening with Cecilia and Mr. Combe on Monday. They are both tired from the effect of their journey still, and look fagged and ill. They have both got the influenza too, which does not mend matters; and I am struck with the alteration in Mr. Combe's appearance. He looks old, as well as ill, and very sad--naturally enough on his return to this place, where his dear brother died.

The _becomingness_ of Cecilia's gray, or rather white, hair struck me more than any other change in her. She has lost the appearance of hardness (coarseness), which, I think, mingled slightly with her positive beauty formerly, and is to my mind handsomer now than I ever remember her. She is not nearly so stout as she was; her complexion has lost its excess of color, has become softer; and the contrast of her fine dark eyes and silvery curls gives her a striking resemblance to Gainsborough's lovely portrait of her mother. She is looking thin and ill, but seems tolerably cheerful.

At the end of my engagement at the theatre, during the whole of which I shall remain with the Mairs, I shall spend a few days with her and Mr. Combe; after which I shall come as far south as Howick, and stay a day or two with B---- G----, and then cross over to Manchester to the Ellesmeres.

I shall hardly be in London before the third week in November. I have had a letter from my sister, announcing their positive return in the spring; but, as she says they will only leave Rome in May, it is improbable that I should see them at all, as I propose going to America by the steamer of the first of June; but Heaven knows what may happen between this and then. Nobody has the same right to "bother" me, as you call it, that you have, for I love nobody so well; besides, as for Emily, she is a deuced deal quicker in her processes than you are, and snaps up one's affairs by the nape of the neck, as a terrier does a rat, and unless one is tolerably alert one's self, she is off with one in her zeal in no time, whither one would not....

I wish you would tell Mrs. Fitzhugh, with my love, that a man who was acting Joseph Surface with me the other night said to me, "Now, my dear Lady Teazle, if you could but be persuaded to commit a trifling _fore paw_ (_faux pas_)."

Give my love to dear Emily.

Ever as ever yours,
FANNY.

MY DEAREST HAL,

I expect to be with the Combes for some few days at least, and do not feel altogether as happy as usual in the anticipation of their intercourse.

I think I have observed growing, as it were, upon them, with regard to certain subjects, a sort of general attitude of antagonism, which strikes me painfully.

All fanaticisms are bad, and the fanaticism of scepticism as bad or perhaps worse than most others, because it wounds more severely the prejudices of others than it can be wounded by them, professing, as it does, to have none to wound.

I am going to stay with Cecilia all next week, and am rather afraid that I shall have to hear things that I love and reverence irreverently treated. We shall probably steer clear of much discourse on religious subjects, though of late Mr. Combe has appeared to me more inclined than formerly to challenge discussion on this ground.

I am afraid I can at the utmost only expect to see my sister for a fortnight after they return, though Henry Greville writes me that I cannot possibly give her the mortification and myself the pain of going away just as she comes back, and that I ought, for both our sakes, to stay at least a month in England after her return: but then he wishes to get up a play with us both.

I think Grantley Manor charming. It gave me a great desire to know Lady Georgiana Fullerton personally; but I am told she has a horror of me, for what she calls my "injustice to the Catholics." What that is I do not know; but whatever it is, I am very sorry for this result of it.

Good-bye, dearly beloved.

Ever yours,
FANNY.

29, ABERCROMBIE PLACE, EDINBURGH, Monday, October 25th, 1847.

The last question in your letter, which nevertheless heads it, having been added on over the date, "How is your health?" I can answer satisfactorily--much better.... I am much delighted at you and Dorothy reserving your visit to Battle Abbey till I come to you, and only hope the weather may give you no cause to regret having done so. I have promised Emily to go down to Bannisters in December, and shall then pay you my visit at St. Leonard's.

I do much wish to be once more with you and Dorothy. I have just concluded a very pleasant arrangement with Arthur Malkin and his wife for staying a few days in the neighborhood of the lakes with them, between Keswick and Ambleside, after I leave Howick.

The weather is, I believe, generally favorable for that scenery as late as November. I have never seen the English lakes, and am not likely soon to have so pleasant an opportunity of doing so.

I have received an application from the York manager to act at Leeds, and having agreed to do so, think I shall probably also act a few nights at York, Hull, and Sheffield, while I am thereabouts; all which, together with my visit to the Ellesmeres, will take up so much of my time that I doubt my being more than a month or three weeks in Orchard Street before my term of possession there expires.... I shall be able to answer your questions about the Combes better when I am with them, but besides my own observation I have the testimony of the ----s to the fact of their having become much more aggressive in their feeling and conversation with regard to "Church abuses," "theological bigotry," and even Christianity itself. I am sorry to hear this; but if they _hurt_ me, I shall heal myself by looking at the Vatican [a fine engraving of St. Peter's, in Mr. Combe's house].

I had a letter from E---- the other day. I am delighted to say that they have quite determined to return in the spring, and it is just possible that I may see them before I leave England.

E----'s account of the Roman reforms is most encouraging, and I must give you an extract from his letter about them.

"A very important decree was published on the 2d of this month, relative to the organization of a municipal council and magistracy for the city of Rome. Besides the ordinary duties of a municipality, such as public works, _octroi_, etc., it is to have the direction of education. This is a circumstance the consequence of which it is impossible to overrate or to foresee. Hitherto, education has been monopolized by the clergy, and moreover by the Jesuits (whose schools have always been the best by a very great deal, to give the devil his due). The new law does not abolish their establishments, or interfere with them in any way, but the liberal feeling being so strong in the country, the rising generation will be almost entirely educated in the schools founded by the municipality; it is the greatest blow the hierarchy has yet received. The council consists of a hundred members, chosen from different classes of society. It is first named by the Pope, and then renews itself by elections; there are only four members to represent the ecclesiastical bodies."

There, Hal, what do you think of that? I sit and think of that most lovely land, emerging gloriously into a noble political existence once more, till I almost feel like a poet.

Love to Dorothy.... I only make Hayes _sensible_ that she is a _fool_ twice a week on an average, not twice a day.

Yours ever,
FANNY.

HOWICK GRANGE, November 14th.

Surely, my dearest Hal, the next time you say you almost despair of mankind, you should add, "in spite of God," instead of "in spite of the Pope."

I arrived here about three hours ago, and have received a most severe and painful blow in a letter from Henry Greville which I found awaiting me, containing the news of Mendelssohn's death. I cannot tell you how shocked I am at this sudden departure of so great and good a creature from amongst his impoverished fellow-beings. And when I think of that bright genius (he was the _only_ man of genius I have known who seemed to me to fulfil the rightful moral conditions and obligations of one), by whose loss the whole civilized world is put into mourning; of his poor wife, so ardently attached to him, so tenderly and devotedly loved by him; of his children--his boy, who, I am told, inherits his sweet and amiable disposition; of my own dear sister, and poor E----, so deeply attached to him,--I cannot bear to think, I feel half stupid with pain. And yet your letter is full of other sorrow. O God! how much there is in this sorrowful life! and what suffering we are capable of! and yet--and yet--these can be but the accidents, while the sun still shines, and the beauty and consolation and _virtue_ of nature and human life still hourly abound.

You ask me if I have written anything in Edinburgh but letters. I have hardly had leisure to write even letters. I do not know when I have worked so hard as during my last engagement there. I have hardly had an occupation or thought that was not perforce connected with my theatrical avocations. I am heartily glad it is over.

Mr. Combe has given me the "Vestiges of Creation" to read, and I have been reading it.... The book is striking and interesting, but it appears to me far from strictly logical in its great principal deduction, as far as we "human mortals" are concerned. Indeed, Mr. Combe, who thinks it most admirable, was obliged to confess that the main question of progress, involving dissimilar products from similar causes, was _non-proven_. And I think there are discrepancies, moreover, in minor points: but that may only be because of my profound ignorance.

The book is extremely disagreeable to me, though my ignorance and desire for knowledge combined give it, when treating of facts, a thousand times more interest than the best of novels for me; but its conclusions are utterly revolting to me,--nevertheless, they may be true.

I cannot write any more. B---- has just given me the _Athenaeum_, with a long notice of Mendelssohn; and I am thinking more of him just now than anything else in the world....

God bless you, my dear.

I am ever yours,
FANNY.

LEEDS, Friday, November 19th.

Mendelssohn's death did indeed give me a bitter and terrible shock. He was one of the bright sources of truth, at which I had hoped I might drink at some time or other. I always looked forward to some probable season of intercourse with him, the likelihood of which was increased by E---- and Adelaide's love for and intimacy with him. Intercourse with him seemed to me a privilege almost certainly to be mine, in the course of the next few years. This is only my own small selfish share of the great general grief. I feel particularly for E----. He seems to find so very few people that satisfy him, whom he is fond of, or who are at all congenial to him, that the loss of a dear friend, and such a man, will indeed fall heavily upon him.

Those whose sympathies are more general, and whose taste can accept and find pleasure in the intercourse of the majority of their fellow-creatures, are fortunate in this respect, that no one loss can make the world empty for them; and thus the qualities of kindliness and benevolence are repaid, like all other virtues, even in this world (which is nevertheless not heaven), into the bosom of those who practise them.

For a person who has permitted intellectual refinement to become almost a narrow fastidiousness, and whose sympathies are of that exclusive kind that none but special and rarely gifted persons can excite them, the loss of such a friend as Mendelssohn must be incalculable; and I am grieved to the heart for E----.

I do not know what is to be done with Covent Garden. I suppose it will remain an opera-house; for to fit it for that it has been made well-nigh unavailable for any other purpose, as I think we shall find on the 7th December, when a representation of "Scenes" from various of Shakespeare's plays is to take place there, for the purpose of raising funds for the purchase of the house Shakespeare was born in.

You know what my love and veneration for Shakespeare are; you know, too, how comparatively indifferent to me are those parts of the natures even of those I most love and honor which belong only to their mortality. The dead bodies of my friends appeal, perhaps, even less than they should do to my feelings, since they have been temporarily inhabited and informed by their souls; but acquainted as you are with these notions of mine, you will understand that I do not entirely sympathize with all that is being said and done about the four walls between which the king of poets came into his world. The thing is more distasteful to me, because originally got up by an American charlatan of the first water, with a view to thrust himself into notoriety by shrieking about the world stupendous commonplaces about the house where Shakespeare was born. It has been taken up by a number of people, theatrical and other, who, with the exception of Macready, have many of them the same petty personal objects in view. Those whose profession compels them, by the absolute necessity of its conditions, to garble and hack and desecrate works which else could not be fit for acting purposes (a fact which in itself sets forth what theatrical representation really is and always must be--do read, _a propos_ to this, Serlo's answer to Wilhelm Meister about the impossibility of representing dramatically a great poetical whole), and who now, on this very Shakespearian Memorial night, instead of acting some one of his plays in its integrity, and taking zealously any the most insignificant part in it, have arranged a series of truncated, isolated scenes, that the actors may each be the hero or heroine of their own _bit_ of Shakespeare.... This is all I know of the immediate destinies of Covent Garden. They have written to me to act the dying scene of Queen Katharine, to which I have agreed, not choosing to decline any part assigned me in this "Celebration," little as I sympathize with it.

If I should hear anything further, as I very likely may, from Henry Greville, of the probable fate of Covent Garden next season, I will let you know, that you may dispose accordingly of your property in it.

I have finished the "Vestiges of Creation." I became more reconciled to the theory it presents towards the close of the book, for obvious reasons. Of course, when, abandoning his positive chain (as he conceives it) of proved progression, after leading the whole universe from inorganic matter up to the "paragon of animals," the climax of development, man, he goes on to say that it is _impossible_ to limit the future progress, or predict the future destinies of this noble human result, he forsakes his own ground of material demonstration, on which he has jumped, as the French say, _a peds joints_, over many an impediment, and relieves himself (and me) by the hypothesis, which, after all, in no way belongs peculiarly to his system, that other and higher destinies, developments, may, and probably do, await humanity than anything it has yet attained here: a theory which, though most agreeable to the love of life and desire of perfection of most human creatures, in no sort hinges logically on to his _absolute chain of material progression_ and development. From the moment, however, that he admitted this view, instead of the one which I think legitimately belongs to his theory, irreconcilable as it seemed to me with what preceded it, the book became less distasteful to me, although I do not think the soundness of his theory (even admitting all his facts, which I am quite too ignorant to dispute) established by his work. Supposing his premises to be all correct, I think he does not make out his own case satisfactorily; and many of the conclusions in particular instances appear to me to be tacked or basted (to speak womanly) together loosely and clumsily, and yet with an effect of more mutual relation, coherence, and cohesion than really belongs to them.

Mr. Combe is delighted with the book--because it quotes him and his brother, and professes a belief in phrenology; but Mr. Combe himself allowed that the main proposition of the work is not logically deduced from its arguments, and moreover admitted that though well versed in _all_ the branches of natural science, the author was perfectly master of _none_. He attributes the authorship to his friend Robert Chambers, or perhaps to the joint labor of him and his brother William. If his surmise in this respect is true there would be obvious reasons why they should not acknowledge so heterodox a book, especially in Edinburgh.

In asking me for _my_ theory of human existence, dear Hal, you must have _forgotten me_ in your craving desire for some--any--solution of the great mystery with which you are so deeply and perpetually perplexed.

How should I, who know nothing, who am _exceptionally_ ignorant, who seldom read, and seldomer think (in any proper sense of the word), have even the shadow of a theory upon this overpowering theme?

To tell you the vague suggestions of my imagination at various times would doubtless be but to re-echo some of your own least satisfactory surmises.

I thank God I have not the mental strength _and infirmity_ to seek to grapple with this impossible subject. The faint outlines of ideas that have at any time visited my brain about this tremendous mystery of human life have all been sad and dreary, and most bitterly and oppressively unsatisfactory; and therefore I rejoice that no mental fascination rivets my thoughts to the brink of this dark and unfathomable abyss, but that it is on the contrary the tendency of my nature to rest in hope, or rather in faith in God's mercy and power, and moreover to think that the perception we have (or as you would say, imagine we have) of DUTY, of right to be done and wrong to be avoided, gives significance enough to our existence to make it worth both love and honor, though it should consist of but one conscious day in which that noble perception might be sincerely followed, and though absolute annihilation were its termination. The whole value and meaning of life, to me, lies in the single sense of conscience--duty; and that is here, present, now, enough for the best of us--God knows how much too much for me.

Good-bye, my dear. I have a most horrible cough and sore throat, and I have been acting with it, feeling every moment that I was doing my poor _parts of speech_ a serious injury by the strain I was compelled to put upon them. You may judge of the state of my voice when I tell you that I received from some anonymous kind friend this morning a bottle of cough-mixture, and all manner of lozenges, jujubes, etc. Give my love to Dorothy.

Ever yours,
FANNY.

ORCHARD STREET.
DEAREST H----,

... I am going with Henry Greville to see Rachel on Wednesday in "Marie Stuart." I wish I could afford to see her every night, but it is a dear recreation. Henry Greville is not "teaching me to act," though I dare say he thinks I may derive profit as well as pleasure from seeing Rachel....

All my friends are extremely impatient of my small gains; I am not, though I certainly should be glad if they were larger....

I have moved my Psyche, my beautiful and serene goddess. As the ancient Romans had especial tutelary gods for their private houses, the patron saints of the heathen calendar, she is my adopted divinity. You know I have had her with me in some of my blackest and bitterest seasons, and have often marvelled at the mere combination of lines which have produced so exquisite an image of noble graceful thoughtfulness. She is not without a certain sweet sternness, too; there is immense power, as well as repose, in that lovely countenance,--how--why--can mere curved and straight lines convey so profoundly moral an impression? She is an admirable companion, and reminds me of Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty," which I every now and then feel inclined to apostrophize her with.

I have sent out the big centre china jar to the table on the stair-case, and have put my goddess in the drawing-room in its place....

I have received a kind invitation from Lady Dacre to the Hoo, and I shall spend next week there, which will be both good and agreeable for me. I expect to find Lady G---- there; she is a person for whom I have a great liking and esteem, and whom I shall be glad to meet. Perhaps, too, dear William Harness; but I do not know of anybody else.

I forget whether I told you that the Sedgwicks had sent me a friend of theirs, an American country clergyman, to lionize about London, which I have been doing for the last three days. I took him to the British Museum, and showed him the Elgin Marbles, and the library, and the curious manuscripts and books which strangers generally care to see; but the profit and pleasure, I should think, of travelling is but little unless the mind is in some slight measure prepared for more knowledge by the possession of some small original stock; and a great many Americans come abroad but poorly furnished not only with learning but with the means of learning.

Charles Greville got me an admission for my Yankee friend to the House of Lords. We were admitted while the business was going on, and saw the curious old form of passing the Acts of Parliament by Commission, than the ceremonies of which it is difficult to imagine anything more quaint, not to say ludicrous, and apparently meaningless.

We heard Lord Brougham and the Duke of Wellington speak, and had an excellent view of both of them.

The House appeared to me too minutely ornamented; it is rich, elaborate, but all in small detail, too subdivided and intricate and overwrought to be as imposing and good in effect as if it were more simple.

I took my American friend to the Zoological Gardens, and to the Botanical Gardens, in the Regent's Park, which are very charming, and for which I have a private ticket of admission.

This morning I have been with him to Stafford House, to show him the pictures, which are fine, and the house itself, which I think the handsomest in London. To-morrow I take him to the opera, and I have given him a breakfast, a lunch, and a dinner, and feel as if I had discharged the duty put upon me, especially as it involved what I have no taste for, _i.e._ sight-seeing.

The Elgin Marbles I was glad enough to see again--one has never seen them too often,--and was sitting down to reflect upon them at my leisure, when my American friend, to whom, doubtless, they seemed but a parcel of discolored, dirty, decapitated bodies, proposed that we should pass on, which we accordingly did.

I am struck with the spirit of conformity by which this gentleman seems troubled, and which Adelaide tells me the young American people they saw in Rome constantly expressed,--the dread of appearing that which they are, foreigners; the annoyance at hearing that their accent and dress denote them to be Americans. They certainly are not comfortable people in this respect, and I always wish, for their own sakes as well as mine, that they had more or less self-love.

I was impelled to say to my young clergyman, whose fear of trespassing against English usages seemed to leave him hardly any other idea, "Sir, are you not a foreigner, an American? May I ask why it is to be considered incumbent upon you, either by yourself or others, to dress and speak like an Englishman?" ...

Good-bye, dear.

I am ever yours,
FANNY.

18, ORCHARD STREET, November 18th.

I do not know that I ever slept so near the sea as to hear it discoursing as loudly as you describe, though I have been where its long swelling edge was heard rolling up and tearing itself to ribbons on the shingly beach like distant thunder. As for night-sounds of any sort, you know my _sound_ sleep is the only one I am familiar with.

In the hotel at Niagara, the voice of the cataract not only roared night and day through every chamber of the house, but the whole building vibrated incessantly with the shock of the mighty fall. I have still health and nerve and spirits to cope with the grand exhibitions of the powers of Nature: the majesty and beauty of the external world always acts as a tonic on me, and under its influence I feel as if a strong arm was put round me, and was lifting me over stony places; and I nothing doubt that the great anthem of the ocean would excite rather than overpower me, however nearly it sounded in my ears.

Your description of the terrace, or parade walk, covered with my fellow-creatures, appals my imagination much more. My sympathies have never been half human enough, and in the proximity of one of nature's most impressive objects I shrink still more from contact with the outward forms of unknown humanity. However, this is merely an answer to your description; I shall find, by creeping down the shingles, some place below, or, by climbing the cliff, some place above, these dear men and women, where I can be a little alone with the sea.

I observed nothing peculiar about the direction of any letter that I have recently received from you; but then, to be sure, I am not given to the general process, which, general as it is, always astonishes me, of examining the direction, the date, the postmark, the signature, of the letter I receive (as many of these, too, as possible, before opening the epistle); I hasten to read your words as soon as I have them, and seldom speculate as to when or where they were written, so that I really do not know whether I have received your Hull letter or not. I do not go thither until Monday next, and return to town the following Sunday....

Oh, my dear, what a world is this! or rather, what an unlucky experience mine has been--in some respects--yes, in _some_ respects! for while I write this, images of the good, and true, and excellent people I have known and loved rise like a cloud of witnesses to shut out the ugly vision of the moral deformity of some of those with whom my fate has been interwoven....

I have agreed with Mrs. Humphreys to take the apartments that T---- M---- had in King Street, from the beginning of January till the beginning of May. She says she cannot let me have them longer than that, but I shall endeavor for at least a month's extension, for it will be so very wretched to turn out and have to hunt for new lodgings, for a term of six weeks.

My success at Leeds was very good, considering the small size of the theatre.... I am not exempt from a feeling about "illustrious localities," but the world seems to me to be so absolutely Shakespeare's domain and dwelling-place, that I do not vividly associate him with the idea of those four walls, between which he first saw the light of an English day. If the house he dwelt in in the maturity of his age, and to which he retired to spend the evening of his life, still existed, I should feel considerable emotion in being where his hours and days were spent when his mind had reached its zenith.

A baby is the least intelligent form of a rational human being, and as it mercifully pleased God to remove His wonderfully endowed child before the approach of age had diminished his transcendent gifts, I do not care to contemplate him in that condition in which I cannot recognize him--that is, with an undeveloped and dormant intelligence.

We know nothing of his childhood, nothing of the gradual growth and unfolding of his genius; his acknowledged works date from the season of its ripe perfection.

You know I do not regret the dimness that covers the common details of his life: his humanity was allied to that of its kind by infirmities and sins, but I am glad that these links between him and _me_ have disappeared, and that those alone remain by which he will be bound, as long as this world lasts, to the love and reverence of his fellow-beings. Shakespeare's childhood, boyhood, the season of his moral and intellectual growth, would be of the deepest interest could one know it: but Shakespeare's mere birthplace and babyhood is not much to me; though I quite agree that it should be respectfully preserved, and allowed to be visited by all who find satisfaction in such pilgrimage.

He could not have been different from other babies you know; nor, indeed, need be,--for a _baby_--_any_ baby--is a more wonderful thing even than Shakespeare.

I have told you how curiously affected I was while standing by his grave, in the church at Stratford-upon-Avon: how I was suddenly overcome with sleep (my invariable refuge under great emotion or excitement), and how I prayed to be allowed to sleep for a little while on the altar-steps of the chancel, beside his bones: the power of association was certainly strong in me then; but his bones _are_ there, and above them streamed a warm and brilliant sunbeam, fit emblem of his vivifying spirit;--but I have no great enthusiasm for his house....

Does not the power of conceiving in any degree the _idea_ of God establish some relation between Him and the creature capable of any approach by thought to Him? Do we not, in some sense, possess mentally that which we most earnestly think of? is it not the possession over which earthly circumstances have the least power? The more incessantly and earnestly we think of a thing the more we become possessed _by_ and _of_ it, and in some degree assimilated to it; and can those thoughts which reach towards God alone fail to lay hold, in any sort or degree, of their object?...

Surely, whether we are, or are not, the result of an immense chain of material progression, we have attained to that idea which preserves alive to all eternity the souls upon which it has once dawned. We have caught hold of the feet of the omnipotent Creator; and to the spirit that once has received the conception, however feeble or remote, of His greatness and goodness, there can be no cessation of the bond thus formed between itself and its great Cause. I cannot write about this; I could not utter in words what I think and feel about it: but it seems to me that if organization, mere development, has reached a pitch at which it becomes capable of _divine_ thoughts, it thenceforth can never be anything _less_ than a creature capable of such conceptions; and if so, then how much _more_?

Farewell. Love to Dorothy.

Yours ever,
F. A. K.

ORCHARD STREET, Monday, 18th.

I arrived yesterday in town, my dearest Hal, and found your letter waiting for me. The aspect of these, my hired Penates, is comfortable and homelike to me, after living at inns for a fortnight; and the spasmodic and funereal greetings of the nervous Mulliner, and the lugubrious Jeffreys, _gladden_ my spirits with a sense of returning to _something_ that expects me.

About Lady Emily ---- and her _ethereal_ confinement: did I not tell you that Mrs. C---- wrote me word from America that Fanny Longfellow had been brought to bed most prosperously under the beneficent influence of ether? at which my dear S---- C---- expresses some anxiety touching the authority of the Book of Genesis, which she thinks may be impaired if women continue, by means of ether, to escape from the special curse pronounced against them for their share in the original sin.

For my part I am not afraid that the worst part of the curse will not abide upon us, in spite of ether; the woman's desire will still be to her husband, who, consequently, will still rule over her. For these (curses or not, as people may consider them), I fear no palliating ether will be found; and till men are more righteous than they are, all creatures subject to them will be liable to suffer misery of one sort or another....

I wonder if I have ever spoken to you of Lady Morley--a kind-hearted, clever woman (who, by the bye, always calls men "the softer sex"), a great friend of Sydney Smith's, whom I have known a good deal in society, and who came to see me just before I left town. In speaking of poor Lady Dacre, and the difficulty she found in accepting her late bereavement, Lady Morley said, "I think people should be very grateful whose misfortunes fall upon them in old age rather than in youth: they're all the nearer having done with them." There was some whimsical paradox in this, but some truth too. An habitual saying of hers (not serious, of course, but which she applies to everything she hears) is: "There's nothing new, nothing true, and nothing signifies." The last time I dined at Lady Grey's a discussion arose between Lady Morley, myself, and some of the other guests, as to how much or how little truth it was _right_ to speak in our usual intercourse with people. I maintained that one was bound to speak the whole truth; so did my friend, Lady G----; Lady F---- said, "Toute verite n'est pas bonne a dire;" and Lady Morley told the following story: "I sat by Rogers at dinner the other day (the poet of memory was losing his, and getting to repeat the same story twice over without being aware that he did so), and he told me a very good story, which, however, before long, he began to repeat all over again; something, however, suggesting to him the idea that he was doing so, he stopped suddenly, and said, 'I've told you this before, haven't I?' And he had, not a quarter of an hour before. Now, ladies, what would you have said? and what do you think I said? 'Oh yes,' said I, 'to be sure: you were beginning to tell it to me when the fish came round, and _I'm dying to hear the end of it_.'" This was on all hands allowed to have been a most ingenious reply; and I said I thought she deserved to be highly complimented for such graceful dexterity in falsehood: to which she answered, "Oh, well, my dear, it's all very fine; but if ever you get the truth, depend upon it you won't like it"--a retort which turned the laugh completely against me, and sent her ladyship off with flying colors; and certainly there was no want of tolerably severe sincerity in that speech of hers.

Lady Morley's great vivacity of manner and very peculiar voice added not a little to the drollery of her sallies.

A very conceited, effeminate, and absurd man coming into a room where she was one evening, and beginning to comb his hair, she exclaimed, "La! what's that! Look there! There's a mermaid!"

Frederick Byng told me that he was escorting her once in a crowded public assembly, when she sat down on a chair from which another woman had just risen and walked away. "Do you know whose place you have just taken?" asked he. Something significant in his voice and manner arrested her attention, when, looking at him for an instant with wide-open eyes, she suddenly jumped up, exclaiming, "Bless my heart, don't tell me so! _Predecessor!_" Lord Morley, before marrying her, had been divorced from his first wife, who had just vacated the seat taken by his second, at the assembly to which they had both gone.

On the occasion of my acting at Plymouth, Lady Morley pressed me very kindly to go and stay some days with her at Soltram, her place near there: this I was unable to do, but drove over to see her, when, putting on a white apron, to "sustain," as she said, "the character," she took me, housekeeper fashion, through the rooms; stopping before her own charming watercolor drawings, with such comments as, "Landscape,--capital performance, by Frances Countess of Morley;" "Street in a foreign town, by Frances Countess of Morley,--a piece highly esteemed by _connyshures_;" "Outside of a church, by Frances Countess of Morley,--supposed by good judges to be her _shiff duver_," etc....

I have just had a visit from that pretty Miss Mordaunt who acted with me at the St. James's Theatre, and who tells me that her sister, Mrs. Nisbett, was cheated at the Liverpool theatre precisely as I was; but she has a brother who is a lawyer, who does not mean to let the matter rest without some attempt to recover his sister's earnings....

I went this morning to inquire at the St. George's Workhouse for the unfortunate girl I took out of the hands of the police in the park the other day (her offence was being found asleep at early morning, and suspected of having passed the night there), and found, to my great distress and disappointment, that she was in the very act of starting for Bristol.

I had, as I told you, interested dear Mr. Harness, and Mr. Brackenbury, the chaplain of the Magdalen, about her, and when I went out of town she seemed fully determined to go into that asylum. The chaplain of the workhouse in Mount Street, however, has dissuaded her from doing so, told her she would come out worse than she went in; in short, they have despatched her to Bristol, to the care and guardianship of a poor young sister, only a year older than herself, who earns a scanty support by sewing; and all that remained for me to do was to pay her expenses down, and send her sister something to help her through the first difficulties of her return. I am greatly troubled about this. They say the poor unfortunate child is in the family-way, and therefore could not be received at the Magdalen Asylum; but it seems to me that there has been some prejudice, or clerical punctilio, or folly, or stupidity at work, that has induced the workhouse officials thus to alter the poor girl's determination, and send her back whence she came, no doubt to go through a similar experience as soon as possible again. God help her, and us all! What a world it is!...

The clergyman of the workhouse called upon me to explain why he had so advised the girl, but I did not think his reasons very satisfactory....

God bless you.

Ever yours,
FANNY.

ORCHARD STREET.

The houses at Plymouth and Exeter were wretched.... These gains, my dearest Hal, will not allow of my laying up much, but they will prevent my being in debt, that horror of yours and mine. I paid my expenses, besides bringing home something, and a considerable increase of health and strength--which is something more....

I remain in town till the end of next week, then go to Norwich, Ipswich, and Cambridge, my midland circuit, as I call it; after which I shall return to London. Towards the middle of August I go to York, Leeds, Sheffield, and Newcastle, thence to visit Mrs. Mitchell at Carolside; after which I shall take my Glasgow and Edinburgh engagements, and then come back to London. There is a rumor of Macready being about to take Drury Lane for the winter, but I have no idea whether it is true or not.

I am sure I don't know what is to become of my poor dog Hero [a fine Irish retriever given me by my friend]. I am almost afraid that Mrs. Humphreys will not take him into her nice lodging. If I can't keep him with me till I go away to America, I should beg you in the interim to receive him, for my sake, at Ardgillan.

You cannot think with what a sense of relief at laying hold of something _that could not lie_ I threw my arms round his neck the other day, after ---- had left me. This is melancholy, is it not? but I believe many poor human creatures whose hearts have been lacerated by their (un)kind have loved brutes for their freedom from the complicated and reflected falsehood of which the nobler nature is, alas! capable and guilty.

Tell me if it will be inconvenient to you to take charge of Hero when I go away. In a place where he had a wider range than this narrow little dwelling of mine, and where his defects were not incessantly ministered to by the adulation of an idiotical old maid besotted with the necessity of adoring and devoting herself to something, he would be very endurable....