And the following from Antwerp, July 23, 1850:--
"Dear Susan, I never see anything beautiful in nature or art, or hear heart-stirring music in the churches--the only place where music does stir my heart--without thinking of you and wishing you could be by my side, if only for a moment."
When Prescott returned from this, his last visit to Europe, he found himself at the very zenith of his fame. In every respect, his position was most enviable. The union of critical approval with popular applause--a thing which is so rare in the experience of authors--had been fairly won by him. His books were accepted as authoritative, while they were read by thousands who never looked into the pages of other historians. Even a volume of miscellaneous essays[20] which he had collected from his stray contributions to the _North American_, and which had been published in England by Bentley in 1845, had succeeded with the public on both sides of the Atlantic. He had the prestige of a very flattering foreign recognition, and his friendships embraced some of the best-known men and women in Great Britain and the United States. It may seem odd that the letters and other writings of his contemporaries seldom contain more than a mere casual mention of him; but the explanation of this is to be found in the disposition of Prescott himself. As a man, and in his social intercourse outside of his own family, he was so thoroughly well-bred, so far from anything resembling eccentricity, and so averse from literary pose, as to afford no material for gossip or indeed for special comment. In this respect, his life resembled his writings. There was in each a noticeable absence of the piquant, or the sensational. He pleased by his manners as by his pen; but he possessed no mannerisms such as are sometimes supposed to be the hall-marks of originality. Hence, one finds no mass of striking anecdotes collected and sent about by those who knew him; any more than in his writing one chances upon startling strokes of style.
Prescott, however, had his own very definite opinions concerning his contemporaries, though they were always expressed in kindly words. To Irving he was especially attracted because of a certain likeness of temperament between them. His sensitive nature felt all the _nuances_ of Irving's delicate style, especially when it was used for pathetic effects. "You have read Irving's _Memoirs of Miss Davidson_," he once wrote to Miss Ticknor. "Did you ever meet with any novel half so touching? It is the most painful book I ever listened to. I hear it from the children and we all cry over it together. What a little flower of Paradise!" Yet he could accurately criticise his friend's productions.[21] Longfellow was another of Prescott's associates, and his ballads of the sea were favourites. Mr. T. W. Higginson quotes Prescott as saying that _The Skeleton in Armor_ and _The Wreck of the Hesperus_ were the best imaginative poetry since Coleridge. Of Byron he wrote, in 1840, some sentences to a friend which condense very happily the opinion that has finally come to be accepted. Indeed, Prescott shows in his private letters a critical gift which one seldom finds in his published essays--a judgment at once shrewd, clear-sighted, and sensible.