all Yorkshire before. I do not know why, during my
"first theatrical career," I did not, but so it was. My harvest now is
not likely to be very great, for the prices at the theatres in Leeds and
Hull are very low, the theatres not large, and so habitually deserted
that an occasional attraction of a few nights hardly has time to rouse
the people from their general indifference to these sorts of
exhibitions. However, I am both living and saving, and am content.

We have in our last letters got upon those subjects which, upon
principle and by choice, I avoid,--bottomless speculations, wherein the
mind, attempting to gaze, falls from the very brink and is drowned, as
it were, at the very surface of them.

Your theory of _partial immortality_ is abhorrent to me--I can use no
other term. Pray conceive me rightly--'tis an abhorrence of the opinion,
which does not include you for holding it; for though my whole being,
moral and mental, revolts from certain notions, this is a mere necessity
of my nature, as to contemplate such issues is the necessity of certain
others, differently organized from mine.

I would rather disbelieve in the immortality of my own soul than suppose
the boon given to me was withheld from any of my fellow-creatures.
Besides, I did not, in the position I placed before you, suggest the
efficacy of _any special kind of idea_ of God, as connecting the holder
of it with Him.

For aught I can tell, the noble conception of the Divinity, formed out
of the extension of the noble qualities of his own soul by the noblest
man, may be further from any adequate idea of God than the gross notion
of a log-worshipper is from the spiritual conception of the most
spiritually minded man (only remember _I don't believe this_). But,
inasmuch as it is something out of himself, beyond himself, to which the
religious element of his nature aspires--that highest element in the
human creature, since it combines the sense of reverence and the sense
of duty, no matter how distorted or misapplied--it _is_ an idea of a
God, it _is_ a manifestation of the germ of those capacities which,
enlightened and cultivated, have made (be it with due respect spoken)
the God of Fenelon and of Channing. I do not believe that any human
creature, called by God into this life, is without some notion of a
Divinity, no matter how mean, how unworthy, how seldom thought of, how
habitually forgotten.

Superstition, terror, hope, misery, joy--every one o