cts, and finally
every month a certain number of pages of humorous matter. A man named
Manuel Cooke established in Philadelphia a _Drawing-Room Journal_. For
this I wrote a great deal for a year or two. It paid me no money, but
gave me free admission to theatres, operas, etc., and I learned a great
deal as to the practical management of a newspaper.

The first summer after my return we went to Stonington, and thence to
visit our friends in New England, as of yore. At Dedham I had an attack
of cholera; my uncle, Dr. Stimson, gave me during the night two doses of
laudanum of fifty drops each, which cured me. Father Matthew came to
Dedham. I went with a very pretty young cousin of mine named Marie
Lizzie Fisher, since deceased, to hear him preach. After the address,
meeting the Father, I went boldly up and introduced myself to him, and
then Miss Fisher. I think that his address must have deeply affected me,
since I was obliged to stop on my way home to take a drink to steady my
nerves. It was against the law at that time to sell such "poison," so
the hotel-keeper took me and my paternal uncle, George, who treated, down
into the cellar, where he had concealed some Hollands. I can remember
that that pleasant summer in Dedham I, one Sunday morning in the church
during service, composed a poem, which in after years even found its way
into "The Poets and Poetry of America." It began with the words--

"O'er an old ruined doorway
Philosophus hung,
And madly his bell-cap
And bauble he swung."

It was a wild mixture of cosmopolitanism and Hamletism, and it indicates
accurately the true state of my _cor cordium_ at that time. Earnest
thought, or a yearning for truth, and worldly folly, were playing a game
of battledore and shuttlecock, and I was the feathered cork. There is a
song without words by Mendelssohn, which sets forth as clearly as
Shakespeare or Heine could have done in words, deep melancholy or
unavoidable suffering expressing itself merrily and gaily in a manner
which is both touching and beautiful, or sweet and sad. Without any self-
consciousness or display of sentimentalism, I find deep traces of this in
many little poems or sketches which I wrote at that time, and which have
now been forgotten. I had been in Arcadia; I was now in a very pleasant
sunny Philistia; but I could not forget the past. And I never forgot it.
Once in Paris, in the opera, I used in jest emphatically the Rus