and how you spent
the day, and how the sea treated you, and everything about everything.

God bless you, my dear.

Ever yours,
FANNY.

BRISTOL, Sunday, May 30th, 1847.

A thousand thanks, dear friend, for Liebig's book. You are right, I want
something more to read. I finished Harriet Martineau (Oh, what ink! wait
till I get some better) yesterday evening before tea, and the pamphlet
on bread after I got into bed, and the "Liverpool Tragedy" (such a
thing!) this morning in the railroad; so that your present of Liebig's
book came to my wish and to my need, just as a gift from you should do;
and I shall spend this Sunday afternoon in learning those wonderful
things, and praising God for them.

I regret very much that I cannot recollect anything distinctly that I
read, because the consequence is that books of an order calculated to be
of the greatest use to me, books of fact and positive scientific
knowledge, are really of less advantage to me than any others, because
of their making no appeal to what I should call my emotional memory, and
so they only profit me for the moment in which I read them. Works of
imagination, of criticism, of history, and biography (even of
metaphysical speculation), leave more with me than treatises of positive
knowledge or scientific facts. From the others, a spirit, an animus, a
general impression, a mental, moral, or intellectual accretion, remains
with me; indeed, that is pretty much the whole result I obtain from
anything I read. But books of _knowledge_, of scientific or natural
facts, though they sometimes affect me beyond the finest poetry with an
awe and delight that brings tears to my eyes, have but one invariable
result with me, to add to my love and wonder of God. Their other uses
depend, of course, upon the memory which retains and applies them
subsequently, either in action or observation; and this I fail to do, by
reason of forgetting: and it is a sorrow and a loss to me, because the
whole world is in some sort transfigured, and life endowed with double
significance, to those who are familiar with the details of the
wonderful laws that govern them, and their self-communion must be as
full of variety and interest as their conversation is to others.

I have infinite respect for knowledge; it is only second in value to
wisdom, and to unite bot