members of Parliament, and certainly the most able of the dissenting
organs, on our favorite poet, Dr. Holmes. Also I have a letter from
Dr. Robert Dickson, of Hertford Street, May Fair, one of the highest
and most fashionable London physicians, respecting my book, liking
Dr. Holmes better than anybody for the very qualities for which he
would himself choose to be preferred, originality and justness of
thought, admirable fineness and propriety of diction, and a power of
painting by words, very rare in any age, and rarest of the rare in
_this_, when vagueness and obscurity mar so much that is high and
pure. I shall keep this letter to _show_ Dr. Holmes, tell him with
my affectionate love. If it were not written on the thickest paper
ever seen, and as huge as it is thick, I would send it; but I'll
keep it for him against he comes to claim it. The description of
spring is, Dr. Dickson says, remarkable for originality and truth.
He thanks me for those poems of Dr. Holmes as if I had written them.
Now be free to tell him all this. Of course you have told Mr.
Hawthorne of the highly eulogistic critique on the "Blithedale
Romance" in the Times, written, I believe, by Mr. Willmott, to whom
I lent the veritable copy received from the author. Another thing
let me say, that I have been reading with the greatest pleasure some
letters on African trees copied from the New York Tribune into
Bentley's Miscellany, and no doubt by Mr. Bayard Taylor. Our chief
London news is that Mrs. Browning's cough came on so violently, in
consequence of the sudden setting in of cold weather, that they are
off for a week or two to Paris, then to Florence, Rome, and Naples,
and back here in the summer. Her father still refuses to open a
letter or to hear her name. Mrs. Southey, suffering also from
chest-complaint, has shut herself up till June. Poor Anne Hatton,
who was betrothed to Thomas Davis, and was supposed to be in a
consumption, is recovering, they say, under the advice of a
clairvoyante. Most likely a broken vessel has healed on the lungs,
or perhaps an abscess. Be what it may, the consequence is happy, for
she is a lovely creature and the only joy of a fond mother. Alfred
Tennyson's boy was christened the other day by the name of Hallam
Tennyson, Mr. Hallam standing to it in person. This is just as it
shoul