hem. Instead of
shooting down long sheets of rushing water, which was what I
expected, we were tossed and tumbled and shaken up and down, in the
midst of a dozen conflicting currents and eddies, which break the
whole surface of the river into short pitching waves, and dance
about in frantic white whirligigs, like the circles of the bad
nuns' ghosts, in Meyerbeer's devilish Opera....

Good-by, my dearest Emily. I am always affectionately yours,

F. A. K.

STEAMBOAT ST. PATRICK, ON THE ST. LAWRENCE,
August 17, 1833.
MY DEAREST H----,

There is lying in my desk an unfinished letter to you, begun about
a week ago, which is pausing for want of an opportunity to go on
with it; but here I am, a prisoner in a steamboat, destined to pass
the next four and twenty hours on the broad bosom of the St.
Lawrence, and what can I do better than begin a fresh chapter to
you, leaving the one already begun to be finished on my next
holiday. My holidays, indeed, are far from leisure time, for when I
have nothing to do I have all the more to see; so that I am as busy
and more weary than if I were working much harder.

We have been staying for the last fortnight in Quebec, and are now
on our way back to Montreal, where we shall act a night or two, and
then return to the United States, to New York and Boston.... The
greater part of these poems of Tennyson's which you have sent me we
read together. The greater part of them are very beautiful. He
seems to me to possess in a higher degree than any English poet,
except, perhaps, Keats, the power of writing pictures. "The
Miller's Daughter," "The Lady of Shalott," and even the shorter
poems, "Mariana," "Eleaenore," are full of exquisite form and color;
if he had but the mechanical knowledge of the art, I am convinced
he would have been a great painter. There are but one or two things
in the volume which I don't like. "The little room with the two
little white sofas," I hate, though I can fancy perfectly well both
the room and his feeling about it; but that sort of thing does not
make good poetry, and lends itself temptingly to the making of good
burlesque.

I have much to tell you, f