I thank you cordially and heartily, both for your letter, and its kind and courteous terms. To think that I have awakened a fellow-feeling and sympathy with the creatures of many thoughtful hours among the vast solitudes in which you dwell, is a source of the purest delight and pride to me; and believe me that your expressions of affectionate remembrance and approval, sounding from the great forests on the banks of the Mississippi, sink deeper into my heart and gratify it more than all the honorary distinctions that all the courts in Europe could confer. It is such things as these that make one hope one does not live in vain, and that are the highest reward of an author’s life. To be numbered among the household gods of one’s distant countrymen and associated with their homes and quiet pleasures—to be told that in each nook and corner of the world’s great mass there lives one well-wisher who holds communion with one in the spirit—is a worthy fame indeed, and one which I would not barter for a mine of wealth. That I may be happy enough to cheer some of your leisure hours for a very long time to come, and to hold a place in your pleasant thoughts is the earnest wish of Boz.—And with all good wishes for yourself, and with a sincere reciprocation of all your kindly feeling, I am, Dear Sir, Faithfully Yours, Charles Dickens. Mr. John Tomlin.” Can anything be more _unique_—or more sweetly beautiful than this letter? In it there is the poetry of feeling warmed into life by his sympathies with the “creatures of many thoughtful hours.” The brain has never yet loosened from her alembic fountain, and dropped upon an author’s page, thoughts more gem-like than those that we see sparkling like diamonds in his letter. Time in her ravages on the thoughts of the departed never harvested more sparkling things than what appears here from the granary of “Boz’s” original mind. Throughout there is a tenderness breathing its seer-like influence on every thought, until it seems to become hallowed like the spirit-dream of a lover’s hope.