pecting your religious and philosophical views; that I
could blame you for not being able, when you look amongst sects and
creeds, to discover any one which you can exclusively and implicitly
adopt as yours. I perceive myself that some light falls on earth
from Heaven--that some rays from the shrine of truth pierce the
darkness of this life and world; but they are few, faint, and
scattered, and who without presumption can assert that he has found
the _only_ true path upwards?

'Yet ignorance, weakness, or indiscretion, must have their creeds and
forms; they must have their props--they cannot walk alone. Let them
hold by what is purest in doctrine and simplest in ritual;
_something_, they _must_ have.

'I never read Emerson; but the book which has had so healing an
effect on your mind must be a good one. Very enviable is the writer
whose words have fallen like a gentle rain on a soil that so needed
and merited refreshment, whose influence has come like a genial
breeze to lift a spirit which circumstances seem so harshly to have
trampled. Emerson, if he has cheered you, has not written in vain.

'May this feeling of self-reconcilement, of inward peace and
strength, continue! May you still be lenient with, be just to,
yourself! I will not praise nor flatter you, I should hate to pay
those enervating compliments which tend to check the exertions of a
mind that aspires after excellence; but I must permit myself to
remark that if you had not something good and superior in you,
something better, whether more _showy_ or not, than is often met
with, the assurance of your friendship would not make one so happy as
it does; nor would the advantage of your correspondence be felt as
such a privilege.

'I hope Mrs. Williams's state of health may soon improve and her
anxieties lessen. Blameable indeed are those who sow division where
there ought to be peace, and especially deserving of the ban of
society.

'I thank both you and your family for keeping our secret. It will
indeed be a kindness to us to persevere in doing so; and I own I have
a certain confidence in the honourable discretion of a household of
which you are the head.--Believe me, yours very sincerely,

'C. BRONTE.'

TO W. S. WILLI