BINGHAMTON, April 14, 1857.
MY DEAR SIR—I should
be more prompt in my correspondence, but it is just now so heavy that if I had
as much clerical force as Byron intimates the recording angel exhausted about
the time of the "crowning carnage—Waterloo," I
should still be as much in arrear as was the head of that overworked
"black bureau."
I should have come
and seen you when at Cortland, but I learned you were ill; and I supposed, too,
that you were so deeply buried in your studies that all you would desire of
your fellow-men would be that they might, as Diogenes said, "get away from
between you and the sun."
The administration
seems to be getting on well, but, I am sorry to learn, is hunted to death by
office-seekers. It is absolutely discreditable to have an administration so
beset that it can do nothing because of office-seeking in a country so full of
undeveloped elements as ours; but so it is.
I am pretty deeply
busied, if not buried, professionally. I would like a little more relaxation
than I find, for I would like to review the poets, from Tasso and Chaucer to
Peter Beebe and Polly Gould; but n'importe.
Mrs. Dickinson joins
me in regards to yourself and family; and especially I desire kind remembrances
to your daughter, who honored me with a note.
