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Kind regards to your dear family. Mr. Briggs is probably again with you: you are indeed among the favored. I think of your Sabbaths all day. Do not forget I am to hear Mr. ---'s Thanksgiving sermon, and the first after his return from Europe.

Now, good-by, Mr. D---, with as much gratitude and love as my simple heart can hold.

P. S. I do not much regret the delay of my note, since it came to you so illustriously companioned. How the simple thing must have blushed being read, while your thoughts were full of words from the burning pen of the Sage of Ashland.

Stone Cottage, August, 1849.

COUSIN WILL: -- Your last poem pleases me exceedingly. I see you have truly the soul of a poet, and I very well understand your desire to travel, and apparent dissatisfaction with the tame way in which you are passing your time. No one more than I would like you to see the wind-god shake old ocean. by his mane, and feast your eye on the Alps and Apennines, and watch their lakes when "red morn glows on their breasts." But, Cousin Will, a poet too well fed, or too much indulged, is apt to lose his muse. It is hard blows you need instead of gentle ones. You, are an only child, the pride of doting parents, and your home is lined with books and papers, and you have tutors and masters always at hand. Hence if I sympathize at all with you, it will be because you are too much favored; for if we lift the curtain of the past, and backward wander, however far, we find written in legible characters upon every page of man's history -- no excellence is obtained without labor. Poverty, Cousin Will, is the nursery of genius, and toil he must who would excel in any course, or have it said of him, he was great or good. Young men of affluence, having little else to do than feast upon the bounties which Providence has assigned them, and bask in the dawn of new enjoyments, are but seldom disposed to contend for meeds of honor, obtained only at the expense of unwearied application and self-denial.

But they often enter the literary course, and for a time may walk in advance of those less favored than themselves, until by self-indulgence and irresolution, they become effeminate; fluctuate, and, to their mortification, yield the palm to their poor but persevering competitors; who gradually advance step by step, treading down every obstruction, and boldly surmounting every barrier; nor tarrying in all the mountain way until they reach the goal, and grasp the object of their anxious but deferred hopes.

The orb of science never shone so brightly on Egypt's monuments of art and grandeur, as when her poor youth, whose eyes beamed with native intelligence, were sought after, and welcomed to her classic halls and bowers. And the Grecian stage was favored with its richest productions, while those priests of nature who dwelt in the upland caves, came down bare-headed and bare-footed, to be the worthy competitors of kings.

In Rome, the seven-hilled city of Fame, whose halls are stored with the treasures of intellect, we find the richest gems of which the world can boast. But the fathers of her philosophy and poetry had no other claims to distinction or honor, than those of true merit. And could we map to our view the panorama of six thousand years, we would, in every age and in every land, find those to whom science owes her improvements, those who have worshipped at the shrine of art, those whose hands have guided safely the helm in the hour of a nation's peril, were not only deprived of the luxuries of life, but were often strangers to its most common comforts. And while toiling in their onward and upward way, the aristocracy of wealth frowned upon them, and while they battled bravely life's pitiless storms, persecuting slander often hurled her envenomed arrows at their venerable and defenceless heads; and but for that unyielding and obstinate determination which never fails, they had, with the multitude, passed unknown away.

We see the high-minded philosopher, Galileo, soliciting the loan of a few shillings to purchase materials for constructing an instrument with which he afterwards shook the great foundations of error. Tycho Brahe said, if he owed the world any thing, it was for its untiring opposition. The learned Kepler said his life had been only a scene of wants and privations. Rollin, a star of moral beauty, ran when a boy with the herd of other ragged lads to say mass; but that ethereal spirit, which beamed from his eagle eye and expansive brow, snatched him a gem from the mud, and bade him shine for ever in the splendors of his own genius.

Columbus, whose soul when unfurled "leaped across the sea and laid bare a world," you know, lived and died stung to his heart's core with want and neglect. The richest minds England has produced were pearls brought up from the darkest obscurity. Kirke White, the genius of musings; Shakspeare, to whom nature gave her magic wand; Chatterton, Sir Humphrey Davy, and his student the bookbinder, in a coarse frock, now no less than Chemist Royal.