our lives long we are more or less intent
on replacing the bright scattered fragments in their original
shape: most of us die with the bits still scattered round us--that
is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or
soiled and defaced beyond recognition, in the life-process. The few
very wise find and place them in a coherent form at last, but it is
quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern
from the original one.

The deaths of the young Napoleon, the Duke of Reichstadt, and
Walter Scott have excited universal interest here, naturally of a
very dissimilar kind. One's heart burns to think of that young
eagle falling like a weakly winter flower, or a faded, sickly girl,
into his untimely grave.... There was nothing for him but death. If
he had been anything, it could only have been a wild spark of the
mad meteor from which he sprang; and as Heaven in its wisdom
forbade that, I think it much of its mercy that it extinguished him
early and utterly, and did not leave him to flare and flicker and
burn himself out with foul gunpowder smoke, and smell of dead men
slain in battle, in the middle of the smoldering ashes of his
father's European empire.

My admiration and respect for Walter Scott are unbounded, and were
I the noblest, richest, and charmingest man in the world, I would
lay myself at Anne Scott's feet out of sheer love and veneration
for her father....

You ask me if I wrote anything on board ship? Nothing but odds and
ends of doggerel. Since I have been here I have written some verses
on the beautiful American autumn, which have been published with
commendation. I am thinking of writing a prose story, if ever again
I can get two minutes and a half of leisure.... Your entreaties for
minute details of our life make me sad, for how little of what we
do, be, or suffer can be conveyed to you in this miserable scrap of
paper!... Our dinner-hour is three when we are actors, five when we
are ladies and gentlemen. The food we get here in New York is very
indifferent. It was excellent in quality in Philadelphia, but
wherever we have been there is a want of niceness and refinement in
the cooking and serving everything that is very disagreeable....

Thursday, Nov. 27th. This is my birthday--in England a