MY DEAR SIR,—I
expect to take my leave of Franklin tomorrow morning, and the last thing I
propose to do, is to write to you. I have now been here a fortnight, having
arrived on Monday, the 21st of October. It is the longest visit which I have
paid to my native place for many years, and it has been quite agreeable. It is
hard to say when I shall look on these hills and vales again, for so many
successive days.
Your visit is a
marked part of the occasion, and I like to repeat the expression of the
pleasure it has afforded me. I sometimes wonder that you should take any
interest in those scenes or these things; but that you do is so much the better
and the happier for me. You left me on Friday, the 1st of this month. I did not
leave home on that day, as I had a good deal of company. Yesterday I was quite
alone till afternoon, when I went to Boscawen, to see and take leave of my
relatives. To-day the weather has been damp, threatening rain, and I have been
out no further than to the barn. The clouds seem now dispersing themselves, and
I look for a good day tomorrow. I duly received your note of Friday from
Boston. The Union meeting was a stirring and spirited occasion, but what may be
the end, I do not know. I expressed to you, you know, three weeks ago, my fears
of a decisive split in the Whig party, and I now strongly fear that result.
Nevertheless, my dear Sir, I go to Washington to stay for a longer or a shorter
time, but determined to do my duty while I do stay. Of personal consequences, I
grow every day more and more careless.
To-morrow is Amin
Bey's dinner. Then I go to Marshfield for a day, and then South. I have been
quite well since you left, though I must confess all the time melancholy, at
leaving a place which is dear to my recollection, and which I cannot expect to
see often. But away with low spirits. Dum
vivimus, vivamus.
P. S. The stars are
all out, but it is too warm for them to be very bright. The night is so
perfectly still that one may hear the trickling of the little brooks. Or else
it is the fall in the Winnipiseogee, away up near “Tin Corner.”
I have got 'em.1
1 During Mr. Blatchford's visit at Franklin,
to which this letter alludes, Mr. Webster expressed much anxiety to find a pair
of steel spectacles which his father had worn the last ten years of his life;
he feared they were lost, but said he should devote a day to hunting for them;
he found them, and told Mr. Blatchford of it by the words "I have got
'em."
SOURCE: Fletcher
Webster, Editor, The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, Vol.
2, p. 399-400
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