myself delighted with the plan; an altogether romantic kind of plan, of romance and reality:  fancy me riding on Yankee withal, at the time, and considering what a curious world this is, that bakes bread for one beyond the great Ocean-stream, and how a poor man is not left after all to be trodden into the gutters, though the fight went sore against him, and he saw no backing anywhere. Allah akbar! God is great; no saying truer than that.—­And so now, by the blessing of Heaven, we will talk no more of business this day.

My employments, my outlooks, condition, and history here, were a long chapter; on which I could like so well to talk with you face to face; but as for writing of them, it is a mere mockery.  In these four years, so full of pain and toil, I seem to have lived four decades.  By degrees, the creature gets accustomed to its element; the salamander learns to live in fire, and be of the same temperature with it.  Ah me!  I feel as if grown old innumerable things are become weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable.  And yet perhaps I am not old, only wearied, and there is a stroke or two of work in me yet.  For the rest, the fret and agitation of this Babylon wears me down:  it is the most unspeakable life; of sunbeams and miry clay; a contradiction which no head can reconcile.  Pain and poverty are not wholesome; but praise and flattery along with them are poison:  God deliver us from that; it carries madness in the very breath of it!  On the whole, I say to myself, what thing is there so good as rest? A sad case it is and a frequent one in my circle, to be entirely cherubic, all face and wings.  “Mes enfans,” said a French gentleman to the cherubs in the Picture, “Mes enfans, asseyez-vous?”—­“Monseigneur,” answer they, “il n’y a pas de quoi!” I rejoice rather in my laziness; proving that I can sit.—­But, after all, ought I not to be thankful?  I positively can, in some sort, exist here for the while; a thing I had been for many years ambitious of to no purpose.  I shall have to lecture again in spring, Heaven knows on what; it will be a wretched fever for me; but once through it there will be board wages for another year.  The wild Ishmael can hunt in this desert too, it would seem.  I say, I will be thankful; and wait quietly what farther is to come, or whether anything farther.  But indeed, to speak candidly, I do feel sometimes as if another Book were growing in me,—­though I almost tremble to think of it.  Not for this winter, O no!  I will write an Article merely, or some such thing, and read trash if better be not.  This, I do believe, is my horoscope for the next season:  an Article on something about New-Year’s-day (the Westminster Editor, a good-natured, admiring swan-goose from the North Country, will not let me rest); then Lectures; then—­what?  I am for some practical subject too; none of your pictures in the air, or aesthetisches Zeug