n. [William Bodham Donne, my brother John's school and
college mate, for more than fifty years of this changeful life the
unchanged, dear, and devoted friend of me and mine--accomplished scholar,
elegant writer, man of exquisite and refined taste, and such a _gentleman_
that my sister always said he was the _original_ of the hero of
Boccaccio's story of the "Falcon."]

God bless you, my dear. I have a pain in my chest, and bad cough, which
don't prevent my being

Yours most truly,
FANNY.

29, KING STREET, Thursday, 3d.

It is no longer the bitter cold morning on which you asked me how I was,
and now I cannot for the life of me remember how or where I was on that
said 26th. Oh, it was last Wednesday, and I was travelling from Lynn to
Cambridge, and I was pretty well, and had a pleasant railroad trip, the
gentlemen in the railroad carriage with me being intelligent and
agreeable men, and one of them well acquainted with my brother John, and
all his Cambridge contemporaries. Though it was cold, too, the sun
shone, and threw long streaks of brightness across the fens of
Lincolnshire, producing effects on the unfrequent and in themselves
unpicturesque farm-houses, with their groups of wintry skeleton-trees
exactly like those in the Dutch pictures, which are, for the most part,
representations of just such landscapes.

Mitchell sent me yesterday a box at the French theatre for a morning
performance of the "Antigone," with Mendelssohn's choruses. Previous to
the performance of the Greek drama, they played, very inappropriately it
seems to me, his music of the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and the effect
of it upon my nerves was such that, though screened by the curtain of
the box, and my sobs drowned by the orchestra, I thought I should have
been obliged to leave the theatre. It is the first time that I have
heard a note of Mendelssohn's music since his death.

How thankful I am I did not attempt that reading at the Palace! What
should I have done there, thus convulsed with pain and sorrow, in the
midst of those strange people, and the courtly conventions of their
condition! Oh, what a bitter, bitter loss to the world, and all who
loved him, has been the death of that bright and amiable great genius!

The Greek play was given in the true Grecian fashion, and was
interesting and curious a