in Boston and a regular "_hedjra_" to Europe
was the consequence.[1]--I spent a year in London, Paris and Berlin, in
a miserable struggle to repair my shattered health, (I had a cough,
contracted from sheer vexation, while in the clutches of the miserable
wretches, who seemed to be determined to vex me out of existence, which
clung to me a year and ever and anon returns again,) and what was still
more difficult, to forget the loathsome reminiscences of the immediate
past by bringing myself in contact with the sanatory influences of the
literature and art of the old world; partly with the intention of
remaining there. I returned, however, in the hope of finding my
difficulties subsided. But the same odious conspiracy, which had even
contrived to mar my comfort and happiness in one place on the other
side, (in Paris, where I spent the greater part of an academic year, at
the University and libraries, in various studies,) had, as I found to my
surprise, kept up a malevolent espionage over my peregrinations even,
and I have since been subjected to a series of vexations and intrigues,
which at times made me regret that I had not preferred any lot in a
foreign land and among entire strangers to such an ignoble
re-establishment at home. A personal attachment of former years was made
use of to harass and lacerate my feelings, and an underhanded, venomous
persecution, (which the parties, who were the authors, and who were in
alliance with certain ecclesiastical tricksters, did not even blush to
own), followed me at every step. The scum of New-York in the shape of
Negroes, Irishmen, Germans, &c., were hired, in well-organized gangs, to
drop mysterious allusions and to offer me other insults in the street,
(and thus I was daily forced to see and hear things in New-York, of
which I had never dreamt before,) while a body of proselyting
religionists were busy in their endeavors to make me a submissive tool
of some ecclesiastical party or else to rob me of the last prospect of
eating a respectable piece of bread and butter. This odious vice of
certain countrymen of yours was in fact the prolific source of all the
difficulties I complain of, and it is remotely the cause of my
confinement here.

[1] The details of this scandalous act of vandalism, which
though it nearly cost me my life, I did not even mention in the
preface to my large German and English Lexicon, finished in the
course of the same year, are too diffuse and complic