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I have millions more, but cannot stop to copy them, or stay you readers to read them, and so adieu! When we meet again we'll may be talk of Night or Noon; by which time may I hope your patience will have become recruited?

Newburyport.

0***.

THE MS. Gazette.

Lebanon Springs, July 30.

DEAR LADY HERON,

THE little feet have done shuffling on the piazzas, and the billiard balls rattle no more over the baths, and the lights one by one have disappeared from the rectangular wing opposite, where many a bright eye is closing its silken fringe, and one, I have the audacity to hope, with a thought of me. And here I sit and scribble, the musquitoes scorching their thin wings in my candle, and one large beetle bouncing against the white wall above me, like a bird trying to fly into a picture-both of them emblems of myself, who still haunt your bright atmosphere, though I but burn my wings, and run my head against the wall which divides you from me, as if it should break the sooner for the exercise of such an impotent anger.

Two o'clock-and were it not that the thought of you is better than sleep, and more especially were it not unfashionable to be seen at breakfast, I would extinguish my light too, and with the echoes of those dizzy waltzes in my brain, woo the "gentle influence" like the hundreds about me-but here I am, and here I shall, and choose to be, till I have relieved my weak heart of its fulness by writing to you, though my letter be nothing but the idle vein of a life like this, and though in its whole pages you find not a word of the feelings with which, to the shame of my pride, I "inly pine,”—not a word of that which alone keeps me waking, and alone could, with the fatigue of those endless cotillons and those dizzy waltzes upon my unknightly limbs. And you at this moment doubtless are asleep-those glorious eyes of yours shaded and still, and that voice that I can hear at this moment in my mind's ear as clearly as the whisper in the immense pines over against my window, silent as a sea shell when the tide is gone, and the indescribable and nameless grace floating ever about you shrouded in the darkness that I could curse be

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cause it will one day cover it forever. I trust you are not reading this by daylight. The cold temper of such hours will turn these wild threads spun at midnight into the veriest cobwebs of romancing idlesse, and I would not for any eye but yours so weave up the fibres of that inward store gathered and treasured only in your presence. But this, in dismal truth, is all idle, for I have said and written, when my voice and pen were far more uncontrollable and eloquent than now, all that I could say-all that language could say to an ear like yours,—and it is weak and unworthy in me now to repeat the forbidden words, and linger even in thought on the theme so earnestly and yet so kindly forbidden. I know you will pardon me however-not so much because, as you will remind me always, I am ten brief years younger than you, but because I am in a strange sphere where my heart is frozen and suppressed, where the leaden compulsion of fashion makes me unwillingly and unnaturally gay, and because I am away from the mild presence, that, like a mist upon a fountain, hides if it does not still its welling waters.

It was a hard condition under which you permitted me to write to you, that my letter should be but a gazette of my adventures, and I have half a mind now to toss these detestable notes from the window, and hazard your displeasure by giving way once more to the irresistible tide whose current is uppermost and deepest within me-but for once I will lay a fetter on a burning pulse, and write to the Lady Heron in all her bewildering eminence of talent and beauty, as if I were a dull cousin penning an epistle of duty, or a travelling editor recording his three meals a day for the edification of his wondering subscribers.

Well-my journal shall be for once au regle. I will begin with the beginning. I left your side at twelve, and at one was in the coach rolling away over the long lighted bridge, and feeling as if every lamp was a star of hope left behind. I love to ride in the night-even when I am miserable. There is something thrilling and mysterious in driving so rapidly through the darkness, by a power which though you understand, you cannot quite realize, and I can fold my arms across my breast, and close my eyes, and believe myself careering through the air upon Cybele's car, or in a shell-chariot coursing with Cythera over the uneven bosom of the sea. more than all, if there were with me and dependant upon my care, any one whom I loved and whom I could sit closely to, and draw to my side in the loneliness of the still hours, a child, or a sister, or, if I dare dream of such a happiness, a wo→

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man whom I loved-there were then, in the solitary separation from the world, in the common danger, in the waking and conscious reliance upon each other, a closely drawn and condensed happiness which might make even a stage-coach with a dramdrinking driver a memento of thrilling happiness. I kept awake for an hour or two till the thin horn of the new moon emerged from the woods, and then with a modest curse upon my folly in coming away without my upper benjamin, I fell into a shivering sleep which lasted till sunrise-a spectacle which, with my blue nose and dull circulation, I would willingly have bartered for a kitchen fire and a blanket. My philosophy revived after breakfast, and the sun and "Coach No. 2" rolled on through the day, bringing to me various moods and feelings of different color, as my long limbs were cramped more or less by the contracted seats, or my materiality needed more or less the refined succulents which sustain it. The next morning we were travelling again before day, and as the sun rose we followed up for miles the course of a beautiful mountain stream, leaping back upon the way we had come as if my own impatient heart had been dipped into its pebbled fountains. Notwithstanding Goethe's beautiful assertion, however, that "we are still in the neighborhood of those we love as long as the streams run down from us towards them," I could not but feel a depression growing with the distance, as if the thread of separation had been "stretched to the crack of doom," and I were hurrying on with all the strings of my heart out of tune and jarring within it. Thus dining, supping, travelling and sleeping, in all particulars like the profane, I arrived at the valley of Lebanon, and having been duly bathed and registered, I was deposited in this eyrie of a room, at the end of a long gallery-the "local habitation" whence I now have the pleasure of addressing

you.

I have been at Lebanon now a week. Our life here is what life always is at the Springs, and I need not detail to you who have seen so many brilliant campaigns on these fields of fashion the particulars of any but the aside drama in which, honest to say, I play but an indifferent character. Lascelles is here-extravagant and witty, and as much un grand seigneur as ever-driving the best horses, and perpetrating the most desperate puns, and wearing the most negligent cravat withal-the most delightful of friends and the most hilarious and yet the most philosophizing and Augustus Tomlinson-ish of free companions. I like him-I always did -though you call him supercilious and ungenial, and though

our beautiful friend (did I tell you, by the way, that her pet setter tore off the skirt of my most felicitous Wheeler on my last stroll through those beautiful grounds-hang him therefore!) though she, I say, does turn up her divinest lip and wonder how any body can think him agreeable. I forgive her that, however, and when I can get another coat that has as exquisite a tournure as the last, I will forgive Sholto too-for did not his mistress sing "Alice Gray" to me till the tears stood in my eyes and did I not inwardly vow at that moment that it should assoil her forever in my mind, not only for all her sins of fashion and worldliness, but for every epigram and satirical ballad and other offence she might commit against me and mine between her present sweet age and thirty. Wellas I said, Lascelles is here, and he and all the other score from the bachelor's wing are revolving about our magnificent friend, Miss McLush, whose large eyes are as liquid and full, and whose Egyptian figure and imperial grace are as captivating, alike to the wise and simple, the gay and the severe, as ever. For myself, however, though I write myself down a devotee to the same centre, I revolve in a more eccentric orbit, and when all others are in attendance upon our splendid star in the drawing room, I am to be seen taking a quiet promenade on the piazzas, with the "lady of the pearl"—the fairest and most spiritual and "delicatest" being that ever lighted by God's blessing on this leaden and every-day planet. I can say no more upon paper, but in your ear, Lady Heron, I will describe a forehead and a gliding step, and the proportions of a shadowy frame that shall touch your heart for one on whom the impress of early and resistless decay is written in that language of most affecting beauty that sometimes half reconciles us to its deadly meaning. There are others here, well worthy of a chapter in the book of a tourist, and I could be well pleased to sketch you by the score-but "the morning star begins to pale," and my hair is damp with this night wind, and I shall be rallied at breakfast, as it is, for my languid eye and my vigil-keeping complexion. For fashions, the pretty women dress their heads with a knot a la Grecq, and truly there are two of them who might have been models for antiques-the perfection of high born, aristocratic beauty. I gaze at them from a distance, for you know that I never worship but one star in a sphere, and you know too, that it is neither a Grecian head nor the look of a "born ladye," but a thrilling tone and a glowing mind, that win me. So I am faithful as a shadow to one, and the rest pass me as unquestioned as "the stars i' the milky way,

A multitude of gentle lights without a name."

Pour amuser, Lascelles has resumed his old habit of publishing for the enlightened a manuscript gazette, and I have stolen the last number from which I send you herewith some extracts. The first article, on Children, is the result of a sleepless night passed by Lascelles in the next room to a crying child::

If there is anything I despise in this world it is a child. How any rational person can endure them is beyond my philosophy. Puling, slobbering, whining, dirty-faced wretches

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I have heard children called beautiful-I have, upon my honor-by sensible people—and poetry has been written about them, and they have been compared to angels (angels!) I have had the curiosity to examine the last ten or a dozen which it has pleased Providence to have held at me. They were pretty"-their mothers and nurses and uncles and brothers and sisters, all swore to it-"beautiful creatures," all of them (that was the very phrase.) Well-I looked at their faces-shapeless pulps, by this hand! their noses! mere nodules of lank muscle without shape or expression-their mouths! loose and watery and silly-their heads! mere lumps of adipose, without expression or color or hair. I looked at their countenances; as expressionless and vacant as a turnip-at their eyes! blank as black buttons, and floating and wandering about in their dull fat like blue beans in a caudle. And then there is such a contemptible imbecility in the nerveless necks of the little sillinesses!

I hate such submissive things. I have seen their heads hang helplessly on the side where it was placed by the hour together, and their unmeaning fingers sticking out in all directions from their dumpling palms, without a twitch or a motion, though they were spoken to and chuckled at till the good-natured nurse was breathless with the exercise. I have seen a puppy of six hours that would take more notice. I have, upon my soul!

I can bear most sounds. I do not always leave the room when a belle sits down to a bravura. I rather like a fish-horn. "Oysters" cried under my window throw me into no convulsions. But the crying of a child is too much. I dream lately o'nights of sitting by the gate of Hades and listening to the screams of the sinners within. There is a fretful child in the room next to me.

My cousin Lucy is a young married woman with four children. I go there once a month to a Sunday dinner. If it were not for the Last Day I think I would rather be burned. She used to take me up to the nursery before dinner; but after being twice under the necessity of sending home for a change of inexpressibles, I insisted, much to my cousin's anger, on deferring it till evening, when such accidents were of less consequence. I have lately ordered a pair of oil-cloth overalls in which I shall dine at all places where I am under the necessity of dandling the little nuisances.

Nothing mortifies me so much as to meet one of those detestable old ladies who remember one "when he was a baby." I always take such a remark as an insult. It is so mean to allude to such a filthy chrysalis-to tell a butterfly that you knew him when he was a worm!

If it ever pleases Providence to inflict a child upon me, I shall stipulate for a wet nurse in the country. I would disinherit a child that should cross my sight before it was three years old-if I wouldn't, hang me! And what is more, I'll cut him out twenty pounds from his inheri

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