“We miss you here very much, and, as I pass your recent lodgings, I often regret that I cannot run up and bore you with a few minutes’ talk; but I think, and such is the general feeling of all your friends, that you ought not to think of resuming your seat this session. The weather and the excitement will both be against you, if you do. “Besides, next December you can resume that expressively vacant seat with the proud consciousness that the wand of the Oligarchy is broken,--or, if a different fortune is reserved for us, which I pray God to avert, to head the forlorn hope which is then to battle for the Right against the Furies which the triumph of the Wrong will let loose on us all. But you know best, and I will not presume to advise. “I was glad to hear the report of your Philadelphia physician, which relieved the forebodings which I fear were preying on you; and it confirms what an eminent physician wrote me, that the action of the absorbent vessels would relieve you slowly, if you would abstain from all excitement and give them the opportunity.” Rev. William H. Furness, of Philadelphia, wrote, under date of August 15, 1856:-- “Dr. Wister says, ‘For God’s sake don’t let Mr. Sumner think of leaving the mountains till the 1st or 15th of September.’ I find that yesterday, when we were jogging down the gorge, it was oppressively hot here, and only last night came there a slight change. Dr. Wister is most _positive_ and _earnest_ in his _opinion_ that you should _remain_ where you are. You will lose everything, if you quit that invigorating mountain air, and run the hazard of being an invalid for months to come. ‘It would be the extreme of folly,’ he says, ‘to turn your back upon your present place.’” The venerable Josiah Quincy wrote from Quincy, under date of August 22, 1856:-- “I entreat you, my dear friend, not to think or act on public affairs until your health is _firmly_ restored. You have time enough before you to perfect your duty to your country, which you have already so gloriously commenced. History will avenge you on your adversary, which not all the votes of all the slave-holders between the tropics can save from an infamy as lasting as the history of our country. “God bless you, and preserve you, and soon restore you to health, to your friends, and your country!” Wendell Phillips, under date of August 23, 1856, renewed his appeal:--