Yesterday we dined at Count St. Aulair's, the French Ambassador, who
is a charming old man of the old French school, at a sort of
amicable dinner given to Lord and Lady Palmerston. Lord John
Russell was of the party, with the Russian Ambassador and lady, Mr.
and Madam Van de Weyer, the Prussian and Turkish Ministers. The
house of the French Embassy is fine, but these formal grand dinners
are not so charming as the small ones. The present state of feeling
between Lord Palmerston and the French Government gave it a kind of
interest, however, and it certainly went off in a much better spirit
than Lady Normanby's famous party, which Guizot would not attend.
It seems very odd to me to be in the midst of these European
affairs, which I have all my life looked upon from so great a
distance.



LETTER: To Mrs. W.W. Story
LONDON, March 23, 1847



My dear Mrs. Story: I should have thanked you by the last steamer
for your note and the charming volume which accompanied it, but my
thoughts and feelings were so much occupied by the sad tidings I
heard from my own family that I wrote to no one out of it. The
poems, which would at all times have given me great pleasure, gave
me still more here than they would if I were with you on the other
side of the Atlantic. I am not cosmopolitan enough to love any
nature so well as our American nature, and in addition to the charm