The days in Boston continued to be pleasant ones. Collins dined with the Schlesingers often and visited other American friends. However, his correspondence began to reveal that his thoughts were turning to his family and friends in London. He was weary and ready to go home. Although he had originally planned to remain in the United States until the end of March, he wrote to his old friend, Charles Ward,

Collins accepted a copy of a collection of short stories by Boston novelist John Trowbridge, which he promised he would read on the voyage home, and which he kept in his library for the rest of his life. On Friday, 21 February, he dined with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at Craigie House in Cambridge. A few days later, Longfellow wrote to his sister-in-law, Mary Appleton Mackintosh:

Collins gave a farewell performance for ‘his friends and admirers in Boston’ on Friday, 27 February. This time the reading was at Parker Memorial Hall, a smaller venue with 850 seats on the corner of Berkeley and Appleton Streets. He read his newly reworked version of The Frozen Deep. As a benefit to the people of Boston, tickets were only $0.50. Although the ‘fine audience’ was held in ‘close attention’, the Boston Daily Globe noted that Collins's theme had been plagiarized and recently dramatized at a city theatre production called ‘Polaris’. When interviewed, Collins sarcastically responded ‘that though American laws protected his watch and his pocket-book, they did not throw their sheltering arms around the product of his brain’.