less so: indeed you stand on too sure
a footing to change, I am persuaded. But you will not thank me for
telling you these things: but I wish you to believe that I rejoice as
much as ever in the thought of you, and feel confident that you will ever
be to me the same best of friends that you ever have been. I owe more to
you than to all others put together. I am sure, for myself, that the
main difference in our opinions (considered so destructive to friendship
by so many pious men) is a difference in the Understanding, not in the
Heart: and though you may not agree entirely in this, I am confident that
it will never separate you from me.

Mrs. Schutz is much delighted with the books you got for her: and still
enquires if you hurt your health in searching. This she does in all
simplicity and kindness. She has been very ill all the winter: but I see
by a letter I have just had from her that her mind is still cheerful and
the same. The _mens sana in corpore sano_ of old age is most to be
wondered at.

_To Bernard Barton_. {50a}

LONDON, _April_, 1838.

DEAR SIR,

John, {50b} who is going down into Suffolk, will I hope take this letter
and despatch it to you properly. I write more on account of this
opportunity than of anything I have to say: for I am very heavy indeed
with a kind of Influenza, which has blocked up most of my senses, and put
a wet blanket over my brains. This state of head has not been improved
by trying to get through a new book much in fashion--Carlyle's French
Revolution--written in a German style. An Englishman writes of French
Revolutions in a German style. People say the book is very deep: but it
appears to me that the meaning _seems_ deep from lying under mystical
language. There is no repose, nor equable movement in it: all cut up
into short sentences half reflective, half narrative; so that one labours
through it as vessels do through what is called a short sea--small,
contrary going waves caused by shallows, and straits, and meeting tides,
etc. I like to sail before the wind over the surface of an even-rolling
eloquence, like that of Bacon or the Opium Eater. There is also pleasant
fresh water sailing with such writers as Addison; is there any _pond_-
sailing in literature? that is, drowsy, slow, and of small compass?
Perhaps we may say, some Sermons. But this is only conjecture. Certainly
Jeremy Taylor rolls along as majestically as any of them. We have had
Alfred Tennyson h