George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[396] parties, and the improvement of the whole. To be sure, we take a great deal when we attract such men as Mr. Cabot, Judge Parsons, Mr. Webster, and Mr. Mason; but we are constantly sending out influences greater and more beneficial, I believe, than any other capital in the country; and influences, too, which we could never put forth, if we could not concentrate and combine such powers in the midst of us, and render them much more active and efficient than they could be scattered through the land in their native homes.

We are all well, though little Nannie shows some feebleness at the approach of spring, which I impute, in part, to the severe illness of the last summer. The little boy is excellently thriving. . . . .

To C. S. Daveis, Portland.

Boston, January 26, 1834.

Mrs. T. has not been so well or so strong for six or eight years, perhaps never before; and, except colds, the children have been well; in consequence of which I suppose we have had, thus far, the merriest winter we have had since we were married. I have just finished a course of twelve lectures on Shakespeare, which have gone off well enough. Mrs. T. has set up an opposition line of soirees every Thursday, which quite distances my humble Sunday Evening concerns, without, however, putting them down; and next Thursday she has invited a moderate fraction of her dear five hundred friends to come and dance it out with her. This, I think, would seem enough to any reasonable person; but on the intervening evenings we have generally been to some sort of a party, from a seven-o'clock sociable to a ball which does not begin till ten; and the daytimes are spent in listening to Miss Walsh,¹ who keeps us in an atmosphere of melody during most of the hours we are awake. The long and the short of the matter is, that if you were here you would not know us for the humdrum people that have heretofore lived in Park Street and Tremont Street, except that you would find us just as glad to see you as ever.

In the summer of 1825 a sorrow had come to him, of a kind he had not felt before, through the death of his second little daughter, only a few weeks old. He refers to it thus in a letter to his friend Daveis:—