"Let us never meet despair
While the little spot is there;
Winter brighteneth into May,
And sullen night to sunny day,--
Seek we then the spot of green
Whence the heavens may be seen.

"I have left myself little space for more small-talk. I must,
therefore, conclude with wishing that your English dreams may
continue bright, and that when they begin to fade you will come and
_relume_ at one of the white-bait dinners of which you used to talk
in such terms of rapture.

"Have I space to say that I am very truly yours?

"B.W. PROCTER."

A few months later, in the same year (1853), he sits by his open window
in London, on a morning of spring, and sends off the following pleasant
words:--

"You also must now be in the first burst and sunshine of spring.
Your spear-grass is showing its points, your succulent grass its
richness, even your little plant [?] (so useful for certain
invalids) is seen here and there; primroses are peeping out in your
neighborhood, and you are looking for cowslips to come. I say
nothing of your hawthorns (from the common May to the classic
Nathaniel), except that I trust they are thriving, and like to put
forth a world of blossoms soon.

'With all this wealth, present and future,
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose,'

you will doubtless feel disposed to scatter your small coins abroad
on the poor, and, among other things, to forward to your humble
correspondent those copies of B---- C----'s prose works which you
promised I know not how long ago. 'He who gives _speedily_,' they
say, 'gives twice.' I quote, as you see, from the Latins.

"I have just got the two additional volumes of De Quincey, for
which--thanks! I have not seen Mr. Parker, who brought them, and who
left his card here yesterday, but I have asked if he will come and
breakfast with me on Sunday,--my only certain leisure day. Your De
Quincey is a man of a good deal of reading, and has thought on
divers and sundry matters; but he is evidently so thoroughly well
pleased with the Sieur 'Thomas De Quincey' that his self-sufficiency
spoils even his best works. Then some of his facts are, I hear,
_quasi_ facts only, not unfrequently. He has his moments when he
sleeps, and becomes oblivious of all but the aforesaid 'Thomas,' who
pervades both his sleeping and waking vis