LETTER XIX.
I last wrote to you, my sweet Agatha, from the National Hotel, a kind of hot oven full of senators and representatives, of travelling gentlemen and ladies, where one was baked soul and body by heat and this high-pressure life; and where I lingered so long merely to remain in company with Miss Lynch, but where we, with our different natures, got on very differently; she in the vortex of social life, of which she is the ornament, I seeking for solitude—the hardest thing to find in such an hotel-world, but of which I nevertheless enjoyed a few moments, partly in my own room, partly walking in the gallery of the court, where I listened to the plashing of the water as it fell into the fountain-basin in the middle of the court, and reposing my soul upon a few words or tones which always return in my moments of solitude, always the same, always sufficient to fill soul and sense, so that, like the water of the fountain, they leap up in clear streams, saluting heaven, fructifying earth! I cannot tell, but you can understand that which I experience at such moments, and that which then lives in my soul: but such moments were not many in the National Hotel, where I lived in daily association with from three to four hundred persons.
To-day I write from a tranquil home where the acanthus and sycamore whisper outside my window, and the lady of the house and I spring around each other as we take a cold bath three or four times a-day.
But a truce now to myself, for great, and nationally important events have occurred since I last wrote, events which have caused a strong vibration through the whole social and political system of every State of the Union,
