immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor
arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget
unchanged by my side--but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.




DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS

IN A LETTER TO B.F. ESQ. AT SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES


My dear F.--When I think how welcome the sight of a letter from the
world where you were born must be to you in that strange one to which
you have been transplanted, I feel some compunctious visitings at
my long silence. But, indeed, it is no easy effort to set about a
correspondence at our distance. The weary world of waters between us
oppresses the imagination. It is difficult to conceive how a scrawl
of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption
to expect that one's thoughts should live so far. It is like writing
for posterity; and reminds me of one of Mrs. Rowe's superscriptions,
"Alcander to Strephon, in the shades." Cowley's Post-Angel is no more
than would be expedient in such an intercourse. One drops a packet at
Lombard-street, and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets
it as fresh as if it came in ice. It is only like whispering through a
long trumpet. But suppose a tube let down from the moon, with yourself
at one end, and _the man_ at the other; it would be some balk to the
spirit of conversation, if you knew that the dialogue exchanged with
that interesting theosophist would take two or three revolutions of a
higher luminary in its passage. Yet for aught I know, you may be some