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the consequences of our actions affect others as well as ourselves; so
that we are warned a thousand ways to avoid evil and seek good, for the
whole world's sake, as well as our own.

What a sermon I have written you! But it was my thought, and therefore,
I take it, as good to you as anything else I could have said.

Of course, children cannot love their parents _understandingly_ until
they become parents themselves; then one thinks back upon all the pain,
care, and anxiety which for the first time one becomes aware has been
expended on one, when one begins in turn to experience them for others.
But the debt is never paid _back_. Our children get what was given to
us, and give to theirs what they got from us. Love descends, and does
not ascend; the self-sacrifice of parents is its own reward; children
can know nothing of it. In the relations of the old with the young,
however, the tenderness and sympathy may well be on the elder side; for
age has known youth, but youth has not known age.

You say you are surprised I did not express more admiration of Harriet
Martineau's book about America. But I _do_ admire it--the spirit of
it--extremely. I admire her extremely; but I think the moral, even more
than the intellectual, woman. I do not mean that she may not be quite as
wise as she is good; but she has devoted her mind to subjects which I
have not, and probably could not, have given mine to, and writes upon
matters of which I am too ignorant to estimate her merit in treating of
them. Some of her political theories appear to me open to objection; for
instance, female suffrage and community of property; but I have never
thought enough upon these questions to judge her mode of advocating
them. The details of her book are sometimes mistaken; but that was to be
expected, especially as she was often subjected to the abominable
impositions of persons who deceived her purposely in the information
which she received from them with the perfect trust of a guileless
nature. I do entire justice to her truth, her benevolence, and her
fearlessness; and these are to me the chief merits of her book....

When Sully, the artist who painted the picture of me now in your
possession, found that it did not give entire satisfaction, he refused
to receive any payment for it, saying that he wished to have it back,
because, as a work of art, it was valuable to him, and that he would
execute another likeness (what a good word _execute_ is, so ap