owed to sleep for a little while on the
altar-steps of the chancel, beside his bones: the power of association
was certainly strong in me then; but his bones _are_ there, and above
them streamed a warm and brilliant sunbeam, fit emblem of his vivifying
spirit;--but I have no great enthusiasm for his house....

Does not the power of conceiving in any degree the _idea_ of God
establish some relation between Him and the creature capable of any
approach by thought to Him? Do we not, in some sense, possess mentally
that which we most earnestly think of? is it not the possession over
which earthly circumstances have the least power? The more incessantly
and earnestly we think of a thing the more we become possessed _by_ and
_of_ it, and in some degree assimilated to it; and can those thoughts
which reach towards God alone fail to lay hold, in any sort or degree,
of their object?...

Surely, whether we are, or are not, the result of an immense chain of
material progression, we have attained to that idea which preserves
alive to all eternity the souls upon which it has once dawned. We have
caught hold of the feet of the omnipotent Creator; and to the spirit
that once has received the conception, however feeble or remote, of His
greatness and goodness, there can be no cessation of the bond thus
formed between itself and its great Cause. I cannot write about this; I
could not utter in words what I think and feel about it: but it seems to
me that if organization, mere development, has reached a pitch at which
it becomes capable of _divine_ thoughts, it thenceforth can never be
anything _less_ than a creature capable of such conceptions; and if so,
then how much _more_?

Farewell. Love to Dorothy.

Yours ever,
F. A. K.

ORCHARD STREET, Monday, 18th.

I arrived yesterday in town, my dearest Hal, and found your letter
waiting for me. The aspect of these, my hired Penates, is comfortable
and homelike to me, after living at inns for a fortnight; and the
spasmodic and funereal greetings of the nervous Mulliner, and the
lugubrious Jeffreys, _gladden_ my spirits with a sense of returning to
_something_ that expects me.

About Lady Emily ---- and her _ethereal_ confinement: did I not tell you
that Mrs. C---- wrote me word from America that Fanny Longfellow had
been brought to bed most prosperously