FEBRUARY 7, 1842.
GENTLEMEN, - To say that I thank you for the earnest manner in which you have drunk the toast just now so eloquently proposed to you - to say that I give you back your kind wishes and good feelings with more than compound interest; and that I feel how dumb and powerless the best acknowledgments would be beside such genial hospitality as yours, is nothing.To say that in this winter season, flowers have sprung up in every footstep's length of the path which has brought me here; that no country ever smiled more pleasantly than yours has smiled on me, and that I have rarely looked upon a brighter summer prospect than that which lies before me now, is nothing.
But it is something to be no stranger in a strange place - to feel, sitting at a board for the first time, the ease and affection of an old guest, and to be at once on such intimate terms with the family as to have a homely, genuine interest in its every member - it is, I say, something to be in this novel and happy frame of mind.And, as it is of your creation, and owes its being to you, I have no reluctance in urging it as a reason why, in addressing you, Ishould not so much consult the form and fashion of my speech, as Ishould employ that universal language of the heart, which you, and such as you, best teach, and best can understand.Gentlemen, in that universal language - common to you in America, and to us in England, as that younger mother-tongue, which, by the means of, and through the happy union of our two great countries, shall be spoken ages hence, by land and sea, over the wide surface of the globe - Ithank you.
I had occasion to say the other night in Boston, as I have more than once had occasion to remark before, that it is not easy for an author to speak of his own books.If the task be a difficult one at any time, its difficulty, certainly, is not diminished when a frequent recurrence to the same theme has left one nothing new to say.Still, I feel that, in a company like this, and especially after what has been said by the President, that I ought not to pass lightly over those labours of love, which, if they had no other merit, have been the happy means of bringing us together.
It has been often observed, that you cannot judge of an author's personal character from his writings.It may be that you cannot.
