NEW YORK, January 7, 1853.
MY DEAR MR. AND MRS. DICKINSON—I should not have allowed your kind letter to remain so long unanswered, had I not, by a very painful finger, been prevented from using a pen. The first use I make of its restoration is to thank you most cordially for your kind invitation to visit you. I assure you nothing would afford me more pleasure than to accept it, were it possible for me to leave home at this time; but my mother's health is delicate, and I am besides so entangled with petty cares of housekeeping and other matters, that however pleasant it would be, I could not just now escape from them. But as your invitation is not limited to this winter, I shall promise myself the pleasure of accepting it at some future time.
I am glad to know that you remember Washington with pleasure. I am afraid it has spoiled me for all other society, with its intellectual superiority and its delightful freedom. It will have for me a new attraction if, after the 4th of March, the two valued friends to whom I write shall be established there, as I most earnestly hope they will be.
I know that you will both be gratified to hear that my success in Washington, for which I was indebted to such kind friends as yourselves, has been the foundation of a permanent independence for my mother and myself. I therefore owe a large debt of gratitude to the 31st Congress collectively, while I have a particular regard for some of its individual members.
While I was in Washington last winter, one great pleasure and privilege which I enjoyed was in writing for Mr. Clay, and in one letter I wrote as amanuensis to Mr. Dickinson, I was strongly tempted to put in a postscript on my own account. Dear old man! he is gone, and how many besides of the brilliant constellation! To-day we have had the sad news of the death of Mr. Pierce's son.1 With what heavy hearts they will enter upon their new life. For me, when I see how death is thinning the ranks of those I once knew, and how friends around me fall, "like leaves in wintry weather," I am sure that I set a higher value upon those that remain, for it is after all in the amenities and affections of social life that happiness is found, or even the shadow of it, which is all that we are here permitted to attain.
At some future day I shall hope to have the pleasure of seeing you here as guests of mine.
Will you remember me most cordially to Mrs. Courtney and your young daughter? and believe me,
* Anne Lynch lived in Washington DC from 1850 to 1853, while serving as the personal secretary to Senator Henry Clay.
1 Eleven year old Benjamin Pierce, son of President-elect Franklin Pierce, was crushed to death and nearly decapitated on January 6, 1853 when the railroad car the Pierce family was travelling in derailed and rolled down an embankment near Andover, Massachusetts.
SOURCE: John R. Dickinson, Editor, Speeches, Correspondence, Etc., of the Late Daniel S. Dickinson of New York, Vol. 2, p. 473-4
