“In compliance with your exhortations, I have begun to think seriously of that story, not, as yet, with a pen in my hand, but trudging to and fro on my hilltop....  I don’t mean to let you see the first chapters till I have written the final sentence of the story.  Indeed, the first chapters of a story ought always to be the last written....  If you want me to write a good book, send me a good pen; not a gold one, for they seldom suit me; but a pen flexible and capacious of ink, and that will not grow stiff and rheumatic the moment I get attached to it.  I never met with a good pen in my life.”

Time went on, the war broke out, and he had not the heart to go on with his new Romance.  During the month of April, 1862, he made a visit to Washington with his friend Ticknor, to whom he was greatly attached.  While on this visit to the capital he sat to Leutze for a portrait.  He took a special fancy to the artist, and, while he was sitting to him, wrote a long letter to me.  Here is an extract from it:—­

“I stay here only while Leutze finishes a portrait, which I think will be the best ever painted of the same unworthy subject.  One charm it must needs have,—­an aspect of immortal jollity and well-to-doness; for Leutze, when the sitting begins, gives me a first-rate cigar, and when he sees me getting tired, he brings out a bottle of splendid champagne; and we quaffed and smoked yesterday, in a blessed state of mutual good-will, for three hours and a half, during which the picture made a really miraculous progress.  Leutze is the best of fellows.”

In the same letter he thus describes the sinking of the Cumberland, and I know of nothing finer in its way:—­

“I see in a newspaper that Holmes is going to write a song on the sinking of the Cumberland; and feeling it to be a subject of national importance, it occurs to me that he might like to know her present condition.  She lies with her three masts sticking up out of the water, and careened over, the water being nearly on a level with her maintop,—­I mean that first landing-place from the deck of the vessel, after climbing the shrouds.  The rigging does not appear at all damaged.  There is a tattered bit of a pennant, about a foot and a half long, fluttering from the tip-top of one of the masts; but the flag, the ensign of the ship (which never was struck, thank God), is under water, so as to be quite invisible, being attached to the gaff, I think they call it, of the mizzen-mast; and though this bald description makes nothing of it, I never saw anything so gloriously forlorn as those three masts.  I did not think it was in me to be so moved by any spectacle of the kind.  Bodies still occasionally float up from it.  The Secretary of the Navy says she shall lie there till she goes to pieces, but I suppose by and by they will sell her to some Yankee for the value of her old iron.

    “P.S.  My hair really is not so white as this photograph, which I
    enclose, makes me.  The sun seems to take an infernal pleasure in
    making me venerable,—­as if I were as old as himself.”