Morning snow and rain with the Streets under water. I continued reading the Bride of Messina which appears to me to be a fine subject for an Opera but it will not bear so well performing. It does not sustain Schiller’s positions. I went to the Office although the day was such as to render it somewhat imprudent to do so. And after I got there my time was not very well employed. Read a treatise of Diderot upon Education in which he advises the studies of every year from eight upwards.1 This is a matter of extreme difficulty and one which must soon press itself upon our attention. I did not walk today. Finished the Ibis and with it all the works of Ovid. I have been about eleven months in reading them and have enjoyed them quite. It has been my rule for a long time past to devote an hour to the Classics daily. What shall I take up next?

Mr. Brooks had company to dine. Professor Silliman, Mr. W. Dalton, Dr. Wainwright, I. P. Davis, Mr. E. Everett, Mr. Frothingham and Edward Brooks. A very pretty dinner but I was very awkwardly placed and was suffering so much from my cold and cough that I did not enjoy it. The conversation much of it political, and of a description which I do not at all sympathize with at the present moment. 100The incidents of the last Winter have so utterly disgusted me with this arrogant, self-sufficient Whig party that I have no wish to see them successful in any thing. The company left quite late and I could do very little afterwards. Read some pages of Grimm and of the Bride of Messina. Read aloud to Mr. Brooks Mr. Binney’s Speech in Congress upon the French question,2 but I felt quite poorly.