MY GOOD, DEAR MADGE,--You do not know how sorry I am, that I cannot see you. But for a week past I have hardly left my chamber. I have been so ill as to give up all College duties, Lectures, &c.; and am very happy to get through--(as I trust I shall) without a fever, which I have been expecting for several days past. To-night I am better and have crawled off the sofa, to write you half a dozen lines. My dear little child; I am truly delighted to know you are in Boston. It is an unexpected pleasure to me. Of course you mean to stay all summer; and I shall see you very often. Write me immediately; and tell me everything about everybody. I shall come and kiss you to death, as soon as my bodily strength will permit. Till then very truly my little dear, Yr. BROTHER HENRY. {46 From the _Chamberlain Collection of Autographs_, Boston Public Library.} {47 _Life_, i. 349.} {48 _Literary History of America_, p. 384.} {49 _The Lovers Seat_, London, i. 36.} {50 Passages from the _Correspondence of Rufus W. Griswold_, p. 46.} {51 _North American Review_, xxxiv. 75.} {52 Passages from the _Correspondence of Rufus W. Griswold_, p. 46.} {53 _Life_, ii. 31.} {54 Bigelow's _Life of Bryant_, p. 3.} {55 _Life_, i. 256, 304.} CHAPTER XIII THIRD VISIT TO EUROPE The year 1841 was on the whole a rather dazzling period for the young poet. His first volume had been received with enthusiasm. His second volume was under way. He had a circle of friends always ready to criticise any new poem or to propose themes for other works; chief among the latter being his friend Samuel Ward, in New York, who suggested the "Phantom Ship," on the basis of a legend in Mather's "Magnalia," and urged the translation of Uhland's "Das Glück von Edenhall" and Pfizer's "Junggesell." A scrap of newspaper, bearing the seal of the State of New York with the motto "Excelsior," suggested the poem of that name. "The Skeleton in Armor" was included within the book and was originally to have given the title to it. Prescott, the historian, said that this poem and the "Hesperus" were the best imaginative poems since Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." Reading the tenth chapter of Mark in Greek, Longfellow thought of "Blind Bartimeus." He wrote to his father that he liked the last two poems in the volume best, and thought them perhaps as good as anything he had written,--these being "Maidenhood" and "Excelsior." It was also in this year that he conceived the plan of the "Spanish Student" and of "a long and elaborate poem by the holy name of 'Christ,' the theme of which would be the various aspects of Christendom in the Apostolic, Middle, and Modern Ages." It shows the quiet persistence of the poet's nature that this plan, thus conceived in 1841, was brought to a final conclusion, more than thirty years after, in