taying in Brighton, to come and remain
with her while my father was there....

God bless you, dear Dorothy. I love you more than I seem to know you,
but I know that you are good, and most good to my dear Harriet, and that
I am

Yours very affectionately,
FANNY.

MORTIMER STREET, Tuesday, November 25th, 1845.
DEAREST HAL,

I had a letter yesterday from my father, from Brighton.... He has
renounced the project of crossing the Atlantic at present....

Of course, dear Hal, we are none of us half patient enough. Suffering
and injustice are so intolerable to us that we _will_ not endure them,
and forget all the time that God allows and endures them.

You ask me if I recollect my discussion with you going down to
Southampton. Very well, my dear Hal, and your appearance especially,
which, in that witch's travelling-cap of yours, is so extremely
agreeable to me that you recur to me in it constantly, and as often I
execrate your bonnet. How much I do love beauty! How I delight in the
beauty of any one that I love! How thankful I am that I am not
beautiful! my self-love would have known no bounds.

I am writing with a very bad pen. I told you of that pen Rogers mended
for me, and sitting down to try it, wrote the two following lines, which
he gave me, of Cowper's:

"The path of sorrow, and that path alone,
Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown."

You will understand that this touched me much. You hope that my nerves
will have leisure to become tranquillized in the country; but the
intellectual life by which I am surrounded in England is such a contrast
to my American existence that it acts like a species of perpetual
intoxication. The subjects of critical, literary, and social interest
that I constantly hear so ably and brilliantly discussed excite my mind
to a degree of activity that seems almost feverish, after the stagnant
inertia to which it has been latterly condemned; and this long-withheld
mental enjoyment produces very high nervous excitement in me too. The
antagonism I often feel at the low moral level upon which these fine
intellectual feats are performed afterwards causes a reaction from my
sense of satisfaction, and sometimes makes that appear comparatively
worthless, the power, skill, and dexterity of which concealed the
sophistry and seduced me while the debate was going o