answer for that disease well deserving its bad
eminence of "painful." It is however, blessed be God! more
manageable than it used to be; and my medical friend, a man of
singular skill, promises me a cure.

I have seen things of Longfellow's as fine as anything in Campbell
or Coleridge or Tennyson or Hood. After all, our great lyrical poets
are great only for half a volume. Look at Gray and Collins, at your
own edition of the man whom one song immortalized, at Gerald
Griffin, whom you perhaps do not know, and at Wordsworth, who,
greatest of the great for about a hundred pages, is drowned in the
flood of his own wordiness in his longer works. To be sure, there
are giants who are rich to overflowing through a whole shelf of
books,--Shakespeare, the mutual ancestor of Englishmen and
Americans, above all,--and I think the much that they did, and did
well, will be the great hold on posterity of Scott and of Byron.
Have you happened to see Bulwer's King Arthur? It astonished me very
much. I had a full persuasion that, with great merit in a certain
way, he would never be a poet. Indeed, he is beginning poetry just
at the age when Scott, Southey, and a host of others, left it off.
But he is a strange person, full of the powerful quality called
_will_, and has produced a work which, although it is not at all in
the fashionable vein and has made little noise, has yet
extraordinary merit. When I say that it is more like Ariosto than
any other English poem that I know, I certainly give it no mean
praise.

Everybody is impatient for Mr. George Ticknor's work. The subject
seems to me full of interest. Lord Holland made a charming book of
Lope de Vega years ago, and Mr. Ticknor, with equal qualifications
and a much wider field, will hardly fail of delighting England and
America. Will you remember me to him most gratefully and
respectfully? He is a man whom no one can forget. As to Mr.
Prescott, I know no author now, except perhaps Mr. Macaulay, whose
works command so much attention and give so much delight. I am
ashamed to send you so little news, but I live in the country and
see few people. The day I caught my terrible Tic I spent with the
great capitalist, Mr. Goldsmidt, and Mr. Cobden and his pretty wife.
He is a very different person from what one expects,--graceful,
tasteful, playfu