theological questions of doctrine (or doctrinal questions of
theology); and that Lady Francis had complained that his letters did not
come sufficiently to the point. What can her point have been?...

As for what you say about deathbed utterances--it seems to me the height
of folly to attach the importance to them that is often given to them.
The physical conditions are at that time such as often amply to account
for what are received as spiritual ecstasies or agonies. I imagine
whatever the _laity_ may do, few physicians are inclined to consider
their patients' utterances _in articulo mortis_ as satisfactorily
significant of anything but their bodily state. Certainly by what you
tell me of ---- his moral perceptions do not appear to have received any
accession of light whatever from the near dawning of that second life
which seems sometimes to throw such awful brightness as the dying are
about to enter it far over the past that they are leaving behind.

My dinner at Mrs. Procter's was very pleasant. In the first place I love
her husband very much; then there were Kenyon, Chorley, Henry Reeve,
Monckton Milnes, and Browning!--a goodly company, you'll allow. Oh, how
I wish wits were catching! but if they were, I don't suppose after that
dinner I should be able to put up with poor pitiful _prose people_ like
you for a long time to come.

With regard to the London standard of morality, dear Hal, I do not think
it lower, but probably a little higher upon the whole than that of the
society of other great capitals: the reasons why this highly civilized
atmosphere must be also so highly mephitic are obvious enough, and
therefore as no alteration is probable, or perhaps possible in that
respect, I am not altogether sorry to think that I shall live in a
denser intellectual but clearer moral atmosphere in my "other world." I
do not believe that the brains shrink much when the soul is well
nourished, or that the intellect starves and dwindles upon what feeds
and expands the spirit.

My little sketch of Lenox Lake lies always open before me, and I look at
it very often with yearning eyes ... for the splendid rosy sunsets over
the dark blue mountain-tops, and for the clear and lovely expanse of
pure waters reflecting both, above all for the wild white-footed streams
that come leaping down the steep stairways of the hills. I believe I do
like places better than people: these only look like angels _sometimes_,
but the earth in such