“I am at last even with my manuscripts,” he wrote to another friend. “It is splendid. Such a heap as had gathered. It had snowed poems and tales and essays, and an eddy had drifted them into my study knee-deep. But I have shovelled myself out, and hope ’tis the last great storm of the season. I even found time to go to Dresel’s concert last evening, where I saw one of your cousins. The concert was nearly all Mendelssohn and seemed to me a little vague and cloudy--beautiful clouds, rose tinted and--indefinite. I longed for a good riving flash of Italian lightning. Fanny liked it, however, but I was rather bored. It seemed to me like reading manuscripts titillated with promise continually and finding no egregious and satisfying fulfilment.” “Don’t come this way again,” he writes to Mr. White, “without letting me know you are coming. I want a talk with you, and I can’t talk by letter, for I can’t write them when I am tired, and I am tired all the time. If there be any truth in the doctrine of compensations, the bobolinks in some other stage of existence will all be caged in Grub Street and made editors. They are altogether too happy here. Well, maybe we shall be bobolinks. If ever we should be, I can show you a fine meadow for building in, a kind of grassy Venice with good tussock foundations jutting everywhere from the water.” After something more than a year’s experience, he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I am resolved that no motive of my own comfort or advantage shall influence me, but I hate the turmoil of such affairs, despise the notoriety they give one, and long for the day when I can be vacant to the Muses and to my books for their own sakes. I cannot stand the worry of it much longer without a lieutenant. To have questions of style, grammar, and punctuation in other people’s articles to decide, while I want all my concentration for what I am writing myself--to have added to this personal appeals, from ill-mannered correspondents whose articles have been declined, to attend to--to sit at work sometimes fifteen hours a day, as I have done lately--makes me nervous, takes away my pluck, compels my neglecting my friends, and induces the old fits of the blues.”[127] “If my letters seem dry,” he wrote again to Mr. White, “it is no fault of mine. I am overworked and overworried and overinterrupted. I _can’t_ write a genial letter, but I want you and like you all the same. If ever I get back to my old nest among the trees at Elmwood, and I am no longer professor or editor, with time enough to follow up a doubtful passage in Shakespeare or a bit of dilettante philology,--then what pleasure I should have in corresponding with you and exchanging thoughts and suggestions. But now, if anything occurs to me, I feel too tired to communicate it to anybody, for my days are so broken that I am forced sometimes to sit up till the birds sing to get any time for my own studies.”