Next to moral conversion, and the reclaiming to their noble uses the perverted powers of human nature, there is nothing does one’s heart so much good as the sight of waste and barren land reclaimed to the uses and wants of man; to see vegetation clothe the idle space, and the cursed and profitless soil teeming with the means of life and bringing forth abundant produce to requite the toil that fertilized it; to see the wilderness crowned with bounteous increase, and the blessing of God rising from the earth to reward the labor of His creatures.  It forcibly reminds one of all that is left undone, and might be done, with that far more precious waste land, those multitudes of our ignorant poor, whose minds and spirits are as dark, as profitless, as barren, as dreary, and as dangerous, as this wild bog was formerly, and who were never ordained to live and die like so many human morasses....  In the evening to the theater, which was crammed from the floor to the ceiling; they are a pleasant audience, too, and make a delightful quantity of sympathetic noise.  I did not play well, which was a pity and a shame, because they really deserved that one should do so; but my coadjutors were too much for me.

Sunday, 22d, Liverpool.—­I did not think there was such another day in store for me as this.  I thought all was past and over, and had forgotten the last drop in the bitter cup....  The day was bitter cold, and we were obliged to have a fire.

         &nb
sp;                                         LIVERPOOL, July 22. 
     MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON,

I fear you are either anxious or vexed, or perhaps both, about the arrival of your books, and my non-acknowledgment of them.  They reached me in all safety, and but for the many occupations which swallow up my time would have been duly receipted ere this.  Thank you very much for them, for they are very elegant outside, and the dedication page, with which I should have been most ungracious to find any fault.  The little sketch on that leaf differs from the design you had described to me some time ago, and I felt the full meaning of the difference.  I read through your preface all in a breath; there are many parts of it which have often been matters of discussion between us, and I believe you know how cordially I coincide with most of the views expressed in it.  The only point in your preliminary chapter on which I do not agree with you is the passage in which you say that humor is, of necessity and in its very essence, vulgar.  I differ entirely with you here.  I think humor is very often closely allied to poetry; not only a large element in highly poetic minds, which surely refutes your position, but kindred to the highest and deepest order of imagination, and frequently eminently fanciful and graceful in its peculiar manifestations.  However, I cannot now make leisure to write about this, but while I read it I scored the passage as one from which I dissented.  That, however,