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  I have yet seen no new men in N.Y. (excepting young Tappan) but only seen again some of my old friends of last year. Mr. Brisbane has just given me a faithful hour & a half of what he calls his principles, and he shames truer men by his fidelity & zeal, and already begins to hear the reverberations of his single voice from most of the States of the Union. He thinks himself five of W. H. Channing here, as a good Fourierist. I laugh incredulous whilst he recites (for it seems always as if he was repeating paragraphs out of his master’s book) descriptions of the self-augmenting potency of the Solar System which is destined to contain 132 bodies, I believe and his urgent inculcation of our Stellar duties. But it has its kernal of sound truth and its insanity is so wide of New York insanities that it is virtue and honor.

  I beg you my dear friend to say to those faithful lovers of me who have just sent me letters which any man should be happy & proud to receive—I mean my mother & my wife that I am grieved that they should have found my silence so vexations, I think that some letter must have failed for I cannot have let ten days go by without writing home I have kept no account but am confident that that cannot be. Mr. Mackay has just brought me his good package & I will not at this hour commence a new letter but you shall tell Mrs. E. that my first steps in N. Y. in this visit seem not to have been prudent & so I lose several precious days. 11 Feb. A Society invited me to read my Course before them in the Bowery on certain terms one of which was that they guaranteed me a thousand auditors. I referred them to my brother William who convenanted with them. It turned out that their Church was a dark inaccessible place a terror to the honest & fair citizens of N. Y. & our first lecture had a handful of persons & they all personal friends of mine from a different part of the city.

  But the Bereans felt so sadly about the disappointment that it seemed at last on much colloquy not quite good-natured & affectionate to abandon them at once but to read also a second lecture & then part. The second was read with faint success & then we parted. I begin this evening anew in the Society Library where I was last year. This takes more time than I could wish, a great deal — I grieve that I cannot come home. I see W. H. Channing & Mr James at leisure & have had what the Quakers call “a solid season,” once or twice. With Tappan a very happy pair of hours & him I must see again. I am enriched greatly by your letter & now by the dear letters which Mr Mackay had bro’t me from Lidian Emerson & Elizabeth Hoar and for speed in part & partly because I like to write so I make you the organ of communication to the whole household & must still owe you a special letter. I dare not say when I will come home as the time so fast approaches when I should speak to the Mercantile Library. Yesterday eve, I was at Staten Island where William had promised me as a lecturer & made a speech at Tompkinsville. Dear love to My Mother I shall try within 24 hours to write to my wife.

  Thanks thanks for your love to Edie. Farewell!

R Waldo E

  It now rains,—a drizzling rain mixed with mist, which ever and anon fills the air to the height of fifteen or twenty feet. It makes what they call an old-fashioned mill privilege in the streets, i.e. I suppose, a privilege on a small stream good only for a part of the year.

  Perhaps the best evidence of an amelioration of the climate -at least that the snows are less deep than formerly-is the snow-shoes which still lie about in so many garrets, now useless, though the population of this town has not essentially increased for seventy-five years past, and the travelling within the limits of the town accordingly not much facilitated. No man ever cases them now, yet the old men used them in their youth.

  The atmosphere is very blue, tingeing the distant pine woods. The dog scared up some partridges out of the soft snow under the apple trees in the Tommy Wheeler orchard.

  Smith’s thermometer early this morning at -22°; ours at 8 A. M. -10°.

  Israel Rice says that he does not know that he can remember a winter when we had as much snow as we have had this winter. E. Conant says as much, excepting the year when he was twenty-five, about 1803 . . .

  I think it is the coldest day of this winter. The river channel is now suddenly and generally frozen over for the first time . . . (Journal, 10:280-281).

  Among the common phenomena of the ice are those triangular points of thick ice heaved up a couple of feet where the ice has recently settled about a rock. The rock looks somewhat like a dark fruit within a gaping shell or bur. Also, now, as often after a freshet in cold weather, the ice which had formed around and frozen to the trees and bushes along the shore, settling, draws them down to the ground or water, often breaking them extensively . . .

Dear Sir,

  I am happy to acknowledge the receipt of five dollars from you, as a contribution to the fund for the public library of Harvard College.

Respectfully yours,

Henry G. Denny, Sec’y Library Committee