mercy twice blessed, for I shall be a safety-valve for your communicativeness and prevent it from splitting honest people's brains who don't understand you; and, moreover, it will be fraught with ghostly comfort to me.
Letter to J. Sibree, Sunday evening, later in 1848.
I might make a very plausible excuse for not acknowledging your kind note earlier by telling you that I have been both a nurse and invalid; but, to be thoroughly ingenuous, I must confess that all this would not have been enough to prevent my writing but for my chronic disease of utter idleness. I have heard and thought of you with great interest, however. You have my hearty and not inexperienced sympathy; for, to speak in the style of Jonathan Oldbuck, I am haud ignara mali. I have gone through a trial of the same genus as yours, though rather differing in species. I sincerely rejoice in the step you have taken; it is an absolutely necessary condition for any true development of your nature. It was impossible to think of your career with hope, while you tacitly subscribed to the miserable etiquette (it deserves no better or more spiritual name) of sectarianism. Only persevere; be true, firm, and loving; not too anxious about immediate usefulness to others—that can only be a result of justice to yourself. Study mental hygiene. Take long doses of dolce far niente, and be in no great hurry about anything in this 'varsal world! Do we not commit ourselves to sleep, and so resign all care for ourselves every night; lay ourselves gently on the bosom of Nature or God? A beautiful reproach to the spirit of some religionists and ultra good people.
I like the notion of your going to Germany, as good in every way, for yourself, body and mind, and for all others. Oh, the bliss of having a very high attic in a romantic Continental town, such as Geneva, far away from morning callers, dinners, and decencies, and then to pause for a year and think de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, and then to return to life, and work for poor stricken humanity, and never think of self again!23
I am writing nearly in the dark, with the post-boy waiting. I fear I shall not be at home when you come home, but surely I shall see you before you leave England. However that may be, I shall utter a genuine Lebewohl.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Feb. 1848.
In my view there are but two kinds of regular correspondence possible—one of simple affection, which gives a picture of all the details, painful and pleasurable, that a loving heart pines after, and this we carry on through the medium of Cara; or one purely moral and intellectual, carried on for the sake of ghostly edification, in which each party has to put salt on the tails of all sorts of ideas on all sorts of subjects, in order to send a weekly or fortnightly packet, as so much duty and self-castigation. I have always been given to understand that such Lady-Jane-Grey-like works were your abhorrence. However, let me know what you would like—what would make you continue to hold me in loving remembrance or convince you that you are a bright evergreen in my garden of pleasant plants. Behold me ready to tear off my right hand or pluck out my right eye (metaphorically, of course—I speak to an experienced exegetist, comme dirait notre Strauss), or write reams of letters full of interesting falsehoods or very dull truths. We have always concluded that our correspondence should be of the third possible kind—one of impulse, which is necessarily irregular as the Northern Lights.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th April, 1848.
I am a miserable wretch, with aching limbs and sinking spirits, but still alive enough to feel the kindness of your last note. I thoroughly enjoyed your delight in Emerson. I should have liked to see you sitting by him "with awful eye," for once in your life feeling all the bliss of veneration. I am quite uncertain about our movements. Dear father gets on very slowly, if at all. You will understand the impossibility of my forming any plans for my own pleasure. Rest is the only thing I can think of with pleasure now.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th April, 1848.
Dear father is so decidedly progressing towards recovery that I am full of quiet joy—a gentle dawning light after the moonlight of sorrow. I have found already some of the "sweet uses" that belong only to what is called trouble, which is, after all, only a deepened gaze into life, like the sight of the darker blue and the thickening host of stars when the hazy effect of twilight is gone—as our dear Blanco White said of death. I shall have less time than I have had at my own disposal, probably; but I feel prepared to accept life, nay, lovingly to embrace it, in any form in which it shall present itself.
Some time in May Mr. Evans and his daughter went to St. Leonard's, and remained there till near the end of June. His mortal illness had now taken hold of him, and this was a depressing time, both for him and for her, as will be seen from the following letters:
Letter to Charles Bray, May, 1848.
Your words of affection seem to make this earthly atmosphere sit less heavily on my shoulders, and in gratitude I must send you my thanks before I begin to read of Henry Gow and Fair Catharine for father's delectation. In truth, I have found it somewhat difficult to live for the last week—conscious all the time that the only additions to my lot worth having must be more strength to love in my own nature; but perhaps this very consciousness has an irritating rather than a soothing effect. I have a fit of sensitiveness upon me, which, after all, is but egotism and mental idleness. The enthusiasm without which one cannot even pour out breakfast well (at least I cannot) has forsaken me. You may laugh, and wonder when my enthusiasm has displayed itself, but that will only prove that you are no seer. I can never live long without it in some form or other. I possess my soul in patience for a time, believing that this dark, damp vault in which I am groping will soon come to an end, and the fresh, green earth and the bright sky be all the more precious to me. But for the present my address is Grief Castle, on the River of Gloom, in the Valley of Dolor. I was amused to find that Castle Campbell in Scotland was called so. Truly for many seasons in my life I should have been an appropriate denizen of such a place; but I have faith that unless I am destined to insanity, I shall never again abide long in that same castle. I heartily say Amen to your dictum about the cheerfulness of "large moral regions." Where thought and love are active—thought the formative power, love the vitalizing—there can be no sadness. They are in themselves a more intense and extended participation of a divine existence. As they grow, the highest species of faith grows too, and all things are possible. I don't know why I should prose in this way to you. But I wanted to thank you for your note, and all this selfish grumbling was at my pen's end. And now I have no time to redeem myself. We shall not stay long away from home, I feel sure.
Letter to Charles Bray, 31st May, 1848.
Father has done wonders in the way of walking and eating—for him—but he makes not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour. I have told you everything now, except that I look amiable in spite of a strong tendency to look black, and speak gently, though with a strong propensity to be snappish. Pity me, ye happier spirits that look amiable and speak gently because ye are amiable and gentle.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 4th June, 1848.
Alas for the fate of poor mortals, which condemns them to wake up some fine morning and find all the poetry in which their world was bathed only the evening before utterly gone!—the hard, angular world of chairs and tables and looking-glasses staring at them in all its naked prose! It is so in all the stages of life; the poetry of girlhood goes, the poetry of love and marriage, the poetry of maternity, and at last the very poetry of duty forsakes us for a season, and we see ourselves, and all about us, as nothing more than miserable agglomerations of atoms—poor tentative efforts of the Natur Princip to mould a personality. This is the state of prostration, the self-abnegation, through which the soul must go, and to which perhaps it must again and again return, that its poetry or religion, which is the same thing, may be a real, ever-flowing river, fresh from the windows of heaven and the fountains of the great deep—not an artificial basin, with grotto-work and gold-fish. I feel a sort of madness growing upon me, just the opposite of the delirium which makes people fancy that their bodies are filling the room. It seems to me as if I were shrinking into that mathematical abstraction, a point. But I am wasting this "good Sunday morning" in grumblings.
Letter to Charles Bray, 8th June, 1848.
Poor Louis