“It shames my manhood that I am so attached to you,” Tracy confessed to Seward after several days’ absence from Albany. “It is a foolish fondness from which no good can come.” His friendship with another colleague, Tracy explained, was “just right, it fills my heart exactly, but yours crowds it producing a kind of girlish impatience which one can neither dispose of nor comfortably endure… every day and almost every hour since [leaving] I have suffered a womanish longing to see you. But all this is too ridiculous for the subject matter of a letter between two grave Senators, and I’ll leave
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