There is no task more difficult than that of speaking of one's intimate friends in print. It is well that the necessity occurs but seldom; for it is a task which it is nearly impossible to do well. Some persons think it as dangerous as it is difficult: but I do not feel this. If a friendship be not founded on a mutual knowledge so extensive as to leave nothing to be learned by each of the opinions of the other regarding their relation; and if, moreover, either party, knowing what it is to speak to the public,—the act of all acts most like answering at the bar of eternal judgment,—can yet be injuriously moved by so much of the character and circumstances being made known as the public has an interest in,—such a friendship is not worthy of the name; and if it can be thus broken up, it had better be so. In the case of a true friendship, there is no such danger; for it is based upon something very different from mutual ignorance; and depends upon something much more stable than the ignorance of the world concerning the parties.

Dr. Channing is, of all the public characters of the United States, the one in whom the English feel the most interest.

I went three times up the Hudson; and if I lived at New York, should be tempted to ascend it three times a-week during the summer. Yet the greater number of ladies on board the steam-boat remained in the close cabin, among the crying babies, even while we were passing the finest scenery of the river. They do not share the taste of a gentleman who, when I was there, actually made the steam-boat his place of abode during the entire summer season, sleeping on board at Albany and New York on alternate nights, and gazing at the shores all the day long, with apparently undiminishing delight.

The first time we went up, the early part of the morning was foggy, and the mist hung about the ridge of the Palisades,—the rocky western barrier of the river. There were cottages perched here and there, and trees were sprinkled in the crevices; and a little yellow strand, just wide enough for the fisherman and his boat, now and then intervened between the waters and the perpendicular rock. In the shadowy recesses of the shore were sloops moored. Seagulls dipped their wings in the gleams of the river, and the solitary fish-hawk sailed slowly over the woods.

Some few years hence it will be difficult to believe what the state of the times was in some parts of the United States, and even in the maritime cities, in 1835. The system of terrorism seems now to be over. It did not answer its purpose, and is dropped: but in 1835 it was new and dreadful. One of the most hideous features of the times was the ignorance and unconcern of a large portion of society about what was being done and suffered by other divisions of its members. I suppose while Luther was toiling and thundering, German ladies and gentlemen were supping and dancing as usual; and while the Lollards were burning, perhaps little was known or cared about it in warehouses and upon farms. So it was in America. The gentry with whom I chiefly associated in New York knew little of the troubles of the abolitionists in that city, and nothing about the state of the anti-slavery question in their own region.