those to whom we owe
affection, let us be dumb until we are strong, though we should
never be strong. I hate mumped and measled lovers. I hate cramp
in all men,--most in myself.

And yet I should have been pushed to write without Samuel
Laurence; for I lately looked into _Jesuitism,_ a Latter-Day
Pamphlet, and found why you like those papers so well. I think
you have cleared your skirts; it is a pretty good minority of
one, enunciating with brilliant malice what shall be the
universal opinion of the next edition of mankind. And the sanity
was so manifest, that I felt that the over-gods had cleared their
skirts also to this generation, in not leaving themselves without
witness, though without this single voice perhaps I should not
acquit them. Also I pardon the world that reads the book as
though it read it not, when I see your inveterated humors. It
required courage and required conditions that feuilletonists are
not the persons to name or qualify, this writing Rabelais in
1850. And to do this alone.--You must even pitch your tune to
suit yourself. We must let Arctic Navigators and deepsea divers
wear what astonishing coats, and eat what meats--wheat or whale--
they like, without criticism.

I read further, sidewise and backwards, in these pamphlets,
without exhausting them. I have not ceased to think of the great
warm heart that sends them forth, and which I, with others,
sometimes tag with satire, and with not being warm enough for
this poor world;--I too,--though I know its meltings to-me-ward.
Then I learned that the newspapers had announced the death of
your mother (which I heard of casually on the Rock River,
Illinois), and that you and your brother John had been with her
in Scotland. I remembered what you had once and again said of
her to me, and your apprehensions of the event which has come. I
can well believe you were grieved. The best son is not enough a
son. My mother died in my house in November, who had lived with
me all my life, and kept her heart and mind clear, and her own,
until the end. It is very necessary that we should have
mothers,--we that read and write,--to keep us from becoming
paper. I had found that age did not make that she should die
without causing me pain. In my journeying lately, when I think
of home the heart is taken out.

Miss Bacon wrote me in joyful fulness of the cordial kindness and
aid she had found at your hands, and at your wife's; and I have
never t