More than one letter of mine, dearest friend, crossed yours, for which I cannot sufficiently thank you.  Nobody can better understand than I do, how very, very glad your own people, and all the good city, must feel to get you back again,—­I trust not to keep; for in spite of sea-sickness, that misery which during the summer I have contrived to feel on land, I still hope that we shall have you here again in the spring.  I am impatiently waiting the arrival of portraits and autographs, and if they do not come in time to bind, I shall charge Mr. Holloway to contrive that they may be pasted with the copy of my Recollections to which Mr. Dillon is paying so high and so costly a compliment.  Now I must tell you some news.

First let me say that there is an admirable criticism in one of the numbers of the Nonconformist, edited by Edward Miall, one of the new members of Parliament, and certainly the most able of the dissenting organs, on our favorite poet, Dr. Holmes.  Also I have a letter from Dr. Robert Dickson, of Hertford Street, May Fair, one of the highest and most fashionable London physicians, respecting my book, liking Dr. Holmes better than anybody for the very qualities for which he would himself choose to be preferred, originality and justness of thought, admirable fineness and propriety of diction, and a power of painting by words, very rare in any age, and rarest of the rare in this, when vagueness and obscurity mar so much that is high and pure.  I shall keep this letter to show Dr. Holmes, tell him with my affectionate love.  If it were not written on the thickest paper ever seen, and as huge as it is thick, I would send it; but I’ll keep it for him against he comes to claim it.  The description of spring is, Dr. Dickson says, remarkable for originality and truth.  He thanks me for those poems of Dr. Holmes as if I had written them.  Now be free to tell him all this.  Of course you have told Mr. Hawthorne of the highly eulogistic critique on the “Blithedale Romance” in the Times, written, I believe, by Mr. Willmott, to whom I lent the veritable copy received from the author.  Another thing let me say, that I have been reading with the greatest pleasure some letters on African trees copied from the New York Tribune into Bentley’s Miscellany, and no doubt by Mr. Bayard Taylor.  Our chief London news is that Mrs. Browning’s cough came on so violently, in consequence of the sudden setting in of cold weather, that they are off for a week or two to Paris, then to Florence, Rome, and Naples, and back here in the summer.  Her father still refuses to open a letter or to hear her name.  Mrs. Southey, suffering also from chest-complaint, has shut herself up till June.  Poor Anne Hatton, who was betrothed to Thomas Davis, and was supposed to be in a consumption, is recovering, they say, under the advice of a clairvoyante.  Most likely a broken vessel has healed on the lungs, or perhaps an abscess.  Be what it may, the