Pleasant morning. I rode to Quincy. Found things much in the same State, but as there was nothing to be done, I felt my time heavy upon my hands. There is a sort of cheerlessness about the lonely appearance 304of an uninhabited Country house before vegetation bursts forth that discourages. And this old house without the large family which I have always seen in it, strikes me as peculiarly dismal. I have no schemes for it’s improvement this year. No objects because I know not when we shall occupy it. The politics of the Country are as unsettled as ever.

Returned to town to dinner and as Abby had gone to Medford with her father, I dined at Mr. Frothingham’s—Sociably and pleasantly enough. Home. Continued Beechy’s narrative of his Voyage. His literary talent is not so good as that of Parry or Franklin.1 My wife returned late. Quiet evening at home.

Day cloudy with heavy showers. I went to the Office and from thence to the Athenaeum where I daudled away time reading little Essays in the English Periodicals of no sort of value to any body or thing. The running Literature of Great Britain is now all froth. Walk and home. Quiet afternoon. Continued and finished Helen—The interest of which story is exceedingly well sustained to the end. Miss Edgeworth is on the whole the best of novel writers because she connects a moral with her story and yet not disgusting or even fatiguing you. She goes also into the folds of the heart, exposes it’s workings in the human family in their dearest domestic relations. A little too much display of reading perhaps but on the whole more diverting by its mass of happy allusion. I admire her works more than I do those of Scott. The latter had perhaps the most brilliant imagination, but he has not the pathos. Evening reading Belinda. Afterwards Göthe in the German reader.