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piratical affair altogether.
The persons engaged in it were chiefly foreigners, and the money to carry it on came from Cuba.
The death of Sir Robert Peel will be felt in the affairs of Europe; in England his great administrative talents will be excessively missed . . . . I have finished your ‘Paradiso,’ and have been more and more struck, as I went on, with the extraordinary mediaeval learning with which it abounds.
No man hereafter, I think, can be accounted a thorough scholar in Dante who has not studied it. I give you anew my thanks for it. I hope you will soon permit me to hear again from you on the subject of European affairs.
At this distance things look more quiet only; hardly more hopeful.
But I trust we are mistaken.
I remain always very faithfully, my dear Prince,
Your friend and servant,
To the Hon. Edward Everett.
Manchester [Massachusetts], July 31, 1850.
my dear Everett,—I have just read your oration of the 17th of June.
I made an attempt in the ‘Advertiser,’ but broke down from the obvious misplacing of some paragraphs, and I am glad I failed, for I have enjoyed it much more here in this quietness, reading the whole without getting up out of my chair, and then looking over certain parts of it again and again, till I had full possession of them.
It was a great pleasure, and I thank you for it. Perhaps some of your earlier efforts were more brilliant, but for real power, as it seems to me, you have never done anything equal to it. Its philosophical views will strike many persons in Europe, and will be hereafter referred to as authority at home.
So much I have thought I might say to you, but to anybody else I should gladly talk on much longer.
We are having a deliciously cool and pleasant summer here, with a plenty of agreeable occupations for the forenoon, and beautiful drives in the afternoon.
I wish you would come down and see us. The beach is as smooth as it was when you bathed on it last year; but I would rather you should come and pass a night, for ‘the evening and the morning’ make the day here, as much as they did in the Creation . . . .
Yours very sincerely, 