nightmare to me.

I have been within two or three of the last for the last week, and
having seldom seen myself so very near the end, I had a perfect fever of
desire to exist, if only for a day, without having a single letter to
answer. And now that I have tossed into the fire a note of Charles
Greville's, which I have just replied to, and have unfolded your last
and do the same by it, _i.e._ answer and burn it, the yellow silk cord
that bound that ominous bundle of obligations lies empty on the
inkstand, and I feel like Charles Lamb escaping from his India House
clerkship, a perfect lord, or rather lady, of unlimited leisure.

You ask me if I think letters will go on to be answered in eternity?
That supposition, my dear, involves the ideas of absence and epistolary
labor, both of which may be included in the torments of the damned, but,
according to my notions of heaven, there will be no letter-_writing_
there. As, however, the receiving of letters is, in my judgment, a
pleasure extremely worthy to be numbered among the enjoyments of the
blessed, I conclude that letters will occasionally come _to_ heaven, and
always be written in--the other place; so perhaps our correspondence may
continue hereafter. Who the writer and who the receiver shall be remains
to be proved (it's my belief that the use of pen and ink would have made
any one of the circles of the Inferno tolerable to you); and in any
case, those are epistles that it is not necessary to antedate. Klopstock
wrote and published--did he not?--letters which he wrote to his wife
Meta in heaven. The answers are not extant; perhaps they were in an
inferior style, humanly speaking, and he considerately suppressed them.

But to speak seriously, you forget in your query one of the principal
doubts that exercise my mind, _i.e._, whether there will be any
continuation of communion at all hereafter between those who have been
friends on earth; whether the relations of human beings to each other
here are not merely a part of our spiritual experience, that portion of
the education and progress of our souls that will terminate with this
phase of our existence and be succeeded by other influences, new ones,
fitted as these former have been to our (new) needs and conditions, by
the Great Governor of our being. He alone knows; He will provide for
them....

The Coutts and Lord Strangford business (a dirty piece of money-scandal)
is nice enough, but I heard a still _nicer_ sequel t