January 7 Thursday – After the Rockford lecture and past midnight, Sam wrote from Rockford to Mary Mason Fairbanks, and to Livy. (Over half of Sam’s nearly daily love letters to Livy have been lost.) That evening Sam again gave his “Vandals” lecture at Library Hall, Chicago, Illinois [MTL 3: 8-9].
Afterwards, Sam wrote from Chicago to Francis E. Bliss (son of Elisha), and to Mary Mason Fairbanks and Others on the Board of Managers of the Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum. To the former, Sam suggested the American Publishing Co. “issue prospectus & startling advertisements…stirring the bowels of these communities.” To Mrs. Fairbanks, et al, he accepted their invitation to give his “Vandals” lecture in Cleveland for their behalf [MTL 3: 14-19].
Sam also wrote a love letter to Livy.

My Dearest Livy— / I was just delighted with your letter received to-day. We forgot the extract, but I have just written to Mrs. Fairbanks, & she will send it to me to be prepared for publication. Your letter was so natural, Livy, & so like yourself. I do wish I could see you! I scold you as bitterly as I can for daring to sit up & write after midnight. Now you have it, at last. And I forgive you & bless you in the same moment! {Oh, you are so present to me at this moment, Livy, that it seems absurd to be writing to you when I almost seem to touch your forehead with my lips.}: I thank you with all my heart for your warm New Year wishes—& you know that you have mine. I naturally thought of you all the day long, that day—as I do every day—& a dozen times I recalled our New Year at Mr. Berry’s. I remembered it perfectly well, & spoke of it to Mrs. Fairbanks—& the Moorish architecture, too. And I remembered perfectly well that I didn’t rightly know where the charm was, that night, until you were gone. And I did have such a struggle, the first day I saw you at the St Nicholas, to keep from loving you with all my heart! But you seemed to my bewildered vision, a visiting Spirit from the upper air—a something to worship, reverently & at a distance—& not a creature of common human clay, to be profaned by the love of such as I. Maybe it was a little extravagant, Livy, but I am honestly setting down my thought, just as it flitted through my brain. Now you can understand why I offend so much with praises—for to me you are still so far above all created things that I cannot speak of you in tame commonplace language—I must reserve that for tame, commonplace people. Don’t scold me, Livy—let me pay my due homage to your worth; let me honor you above all women; let me love you with a love that knows no doubt, no question—for you are my world, my life, my pride, my all of earth that is worth the having. Develop your faults, if you have them—they have no terrors for me—nothing shall tear you out of my heart. Livy, if you only knew how much I love you! But I couldn’t make you comprehend it, though I wrote a year [MTL 3: 10]. Note: Thomas S. & Anna E. Berry, friends of the Langdons.