bambino half of the
time)--looking at your mood reverential as a droll jest,--vexed at
first, but then reconciled, about the book and the lecturing,--charmed
and grateful beyond measure at what you say about your health,--when!
at last!! I fell upon your request: "Now give me one brief epistle
between this and our seeing you."!!! BETWEEN! what a word! what a
hiatus! what a gulf! Down into it tumbled pride, vanity, pleasure,
everything. Well, great occasions call out virtue. As I emerged, as I
came up, I came up a hero; the vanities of this world were all struck
off from me in my fall, and I came up a hero; for I determined I would
write to you immediately. There! beat that if you can! I give you a
chance,-one chance,--I don't ask YOU to write at all.

What is it you call my study now-a-days,--"terrible moral metaphysics "?
You may well say "weighed down" with them. I was never in my life before
quite so modest as I am now. Not that I have n't enough to say, and all
my faculties leap to the task; but all the while there looms up before
me an ideal of what such a course of lectures might be, that I fear I
shall never reach up to, no, nor one twentieth part of the way to
it. . . .

[221]To Mrs. David Lane.

SHEFFIELD, Jan. 25, 1851.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--You won't come, and I will write to you! See the
difference. See how I return good for evil!

I say, you won't come; for I have a letter from Mrs. Curtis, from which
it is evident the will not, and so I suppose that laudable conspiracy
falls to the ground. However, we shall sort o' look for you all the
week. But you won't come. I know it to my fingers' ends. Cradled in
luxury, wrapped in comfort, enervated by city indulgences, sophisticated
by fashionable society--well, I won't finish the essay; but you won't
come.

Ah! speaking of fashionable society,--that reminds me,--you ask a
question, and say, "Answer me." Well, then,--society we must have;
and all the question I should have to ask about it would be whether it
pleased me,--not whether everybody in it pleased me, but whether its
general tone did not offend me, and then, whether I could find persons
in it with whose minds I could have grateful and good intercourse. If
I could, I don't think the word "fashion," or the word "world," would
scare me. As to the time given to it, and the time to be reserved for
weightier matters, that is, to be sure, very material. But the chief
thing is a reigning spirit in our life, ga