“Here I am in the deep mud of the prairies, misled I fear into this bog, not by a will-of-the-wisp, such as shine in bogs, but by a young New Hampshire editor, who over-estimated the strength of both of us, and fancied I should glitter in the prairie and draw the prairie birds and waders. It rains and thaws incessantly, and if we step off the short street we go up to the shoulders, perhaps, in mud. My chamber is a cabin; my fellow-boarders are legislators.... Two or three governors or ex-governors live in the house.... I cannot command daylight and solitude for study or for more than a scrawl.” ...
“A cold, raw country this, and plenty of night-travelling and arriving at four in the morning to take the last and worst bed in the tavern. Advancing day brings mercy and favour to me, but not the sleep.... Mercury 15° below zero.... I find well-disposed, kindly people among these sinewy farmers of the North, but in all that is called cultivation they are only ten years old.”
He says in another letter (in 1860), “I saw Michigan and its forests and the Wolverines pretty thoroughly;” and on another page Mr. Cabot shows him as speaking of his engagements to lecture in the West as the obligation to “wade, and freeze, and ride, and run, and suffer all manner of indignities.” This was not New England, but as regards the country districts throughout, at that time, it was a question of degree. Certainly never was the fine wine of philosophy carried to remoter or queerer corners: never was a more delicate diet offered to “two or three governors, or ex-governors,” living in a cabin. It was Mercury, shivering in a mackintosh, bearing nectar and ambrosia to the gods whom he wished those who lived in cabins to endeavour to feel that they might be.