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

[416] intellectual resources and supremacy. In America we thank God for all these things, and count them among the blessings and honors of the age in which we live.

I suppose you hear much about the United States and its public policy that is disagreeable. Indeed, I know you do. But I pray you to believe as little of it as you can. I have never belonged to the party that brought Mr. Buchanan into power, and never expect to sustain its measures on any national subject. Still, I do not impute to Mr. Buchanan all the political extravagances that are sometimes charged on him by my more ardent friends. That he desires the extension of slavery I much doubt. That he cannot succeed in extending it, if he desire so to do, I feel sure. Be persuaded, I pray you, that Kansas will be a free State. I felt certain of this when I had the happiness of seeing you in 1856, and I have never doubted it for a moment since. It may be a year or two before this result can be accomplished. But it is, in my humble judgment, as certain as anything future can be. Nor will one square mile belonging now to the territory of the United States be cursed with slavery, which is not at this present moment cursed with it. Of course I do not speak of Cuba or Mexico. I only pray that they may never be added to our Confederacy. Nor will they, except with the consent of Europe.

To Sir Edmund Head.

Boston, June 21, 1858.

I hope the second edition of ‘Shall and Will’¹ may come soon, and that there will be plenty of quotations from Shakespeare in it. There ought to be, after the pains you took. The Bible, too,—King James's,—will furnish the best of illustrations. I am not certain but that it is the constant use of this book that has kept us so very exact about ‘Shall and Will,’ from the Puritan times down. At any rate, we are all right in New England. I never knew a person among us—who was born here, or who was bred in our schools— to make a mistake in the use of these two idiomatic auxiliaries. Indeed, I do not think I hear one once a year, and it is so offensive to me, that I am sure a slight deviation would not escape my notice.

Boston, September 14, 1858

Please thank kind Lady Head for transcribing the version of the last elegy of Propertius.² It is not very close, yet remarkably phrased,