irregularity of the streets and buildings, form constantly "little
bits" that would gladden the eye of a painter. The sky here is
beautiful; I find in it what you have seen in Italy, and I only in
Angerstein's Gallery, the orange sunsets of Claude Lorraine.

We leave New York for Philadelphia after next week, and shall
remain there three weeks.

I have read and noted much of your pretty book. There are one or
two points which shall "serve for sweet discourses" in our time to
come. I find great satisfaction in our discussions, for though I
may not often confess to being convinced by your arguments in our
differences (does any one ever do so?), I derive so much
information from them, that they are as profitable as pleasant to
me. Are you going to be busy with your pen soon again? Write me how
the world is going on yonder, and believe me ever truly yours,

F. A. K.

NEW YORK, September 30, 1832.

DEAREST H----,

... Perhaps, as you say, it is morbid to dwell as I do upon the
unreality of acting, because its tangible reality makes its
appearance duly every morning with the "returns" of the preceding
night; but I am not sure that it is morbid to consider wants
exaggerated and necessities unreal which render insufficient
earnings that would be ample for any one's real need. A livelihood,
of course, we could make in England.... You speak of all the
various strange things I am to see, and the amount of knowledge I
shall involuntarily acquire, by this residence in America; but you
know I am what Dr. Johnson would have considered disgracefully
"incurious," and the lazy intellectual indifference which induced
me to live in London by the very spring of the fountain of
knowledge without so much as stooping my lips to it, prevails with
me here.

[Our house in Great Russell Street, which was the last at the corner of
Montague Place, adjoined the British Museum, and has since been taken
into, or removed for (I don't know which), the new buildings of that
institution. Our friend Panizzi, the learned librarian, lived in the
house that stood where ours, formerly my uncle's, did. While we were
still living there, however, I was allowed a privileged entrance at all
times to the library, an