My heart sinks
always as I ascend the stairs to my office, from a dim augury of ill news
from Lisbon that I may perhaps hear,--of black-sealed letters, or some
such horrors. Nothing gives me any joy. I have learned what the
bitterness of exile is, in these days; and I never should have known it
but for the absence of "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,"--I can
perfectly appreciate that line of Goldsmith; for it well expresses my own
torpid, unenterprising, joyless state of mind and heart. I am like an
uprooted plant, wilted and drooping. Life seems so purposeless as not to
be worth the trouble of carrying it on any further.
I was at a dinner, the other evening, at Mr. B------'s, where the
entertainment was almost entirely American,--New York oysters, raw,
stewed, and fried; soup of American partridges, particularly good; also
terrapin soup, rich, but not to my taste; American pork and beans, baked
in Yankee style; a noble American turkey, weighing thirty-one pounds;
and, at the other end of the table, an American round of beef, which the
Englishmen present allowed to be delicious, and worth a guinea an ounce.
I forget the other American dishes, if there were any more,--O yes!
canvas-back ducks, coming on with the sweets, in the usual English
fashion. We ought to have had Catawba wine; but this was wanting,
although there was plenty of hock, champagne, sherry, madeira, port, and
claret. Our host is a very jolly man, and the dinner was a merrier and
noisier one than any English dinner within my experience.
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