on me, and sorry
I was it was not in my power to render to [Sir Robert Smyth] the service
that you asked.

I have now fulfilled my engagement, and I hope your expectation, in
relating the case of [Johnson], landed back on the shore of life, by
the mistake of the pilot who was conducting him out; and preserved
afterwards from prison, perhaps a worse fate, without knowing it
himself.

You say a story cannot be too melancholy for you. This is interesting
and affecting, but not melancholy. It may raise in your mind a
sympathetic sentiment in reading it; and though it may start a tear of
pity, you will not have a tear of sorrow to drop on the page.

*****

Here, my contemplative correspondent, let us stop and look back upon the
scene. The matters here related being all facts, are strongly pictured
in my mind, and in this sense Forgetfulness does not apply. But facts
and feelings are distinct things, and it is against feelings that the
opium wand of Forgetfulness draws us into ease. Look back on any scene
or subject that once gave you distress, for all of us have felt some,
and you will find, that though the remembrance of the fact is not
extinct in your memory, the feeling is extinct in your mind. You can
remember when you had felt distress, but you cannot feel that distress
again, and perhaps will wonder you felt it then. It is like a shadow
that loses itself by light.

It is often difficult to know what is a misfortune: that which we feel
as a great one today, may be the means of turning aside our steps into
some new path that leads to happiness yet unknown. In tracing the scenes
of my own life, I can discover that the condition I now enjoy, which is
sweet to me, and will be more so when I get to America, except by the
loss of your society, has been produced, in the first instance, in my
being disappointed in former projects. Under that impenetrable veil,
futurity, we know not what is concealed, and the day to arrive is hidden
from us. Turning then our thoughts to those cases of despair that lead
to suicide, when, "the mind," as you say, "neither sees nor hears, and
holds counsel only with itself; when the very idea of consolation would
add to the torture, and self-destruction is its only aim," what, it may
be asked, is the best advice, what the best relief? I answer, seek it
not in reason, for the mind is at war with reason, and to reason against
feelings is as vain as to reason against fire: it serves only to tort