wn to Portobello
with all sorts of horrible presentiments. I was glad when I turned the
corner and saw the blinds still up. He was definitely better, if the
word definitely can be used about such a detestably insidious complaint.
I have ordered _Consuelo_ for you, and you should have it soon this
week; I mean next week of course; I am thinking when you will receive
this letter, not of now when I am writing it.

I am so tired; but I am very hopeful. All will be well some time, if it
be only when we are dead. One thing I see so clearly. Death is the end
neither of joy nor sorrow. Let us pass into the clods and come up again
as grass and flowers; we shall still be this wonderful, shrinking,
sentient matter--we shall still thrill to the sun and grow relaxed and
quiet after rain, and have all manner of pains and pleasures that we
know not of now. Consciousness, and ganglia, and suchlike, are after all
but theories. And who knows? This God may not be cruel when all is done;
he may relent and be good to us _a la fin des fins_. Think of how he
tempers our afflictions to us, of how tenderly he mixes in bright joys
with the grey web of trouble and care that we call our life. Think of
how he gives, who takes away. Out of the bottom of the miry clay I write
this; and I look forward confidently; I have faith after all; I believe,
I hope, I _will_ not have it reft from me; there _is_ something good
behind it all, bitter and terrible as it seems. The infinite majesty (as
it will be always in regard to us the bubbles of an hour) the infinite
majesty must have moments, if it were no more, of greatness; must
sometimes be touched with a feeling for our infirmities, must sometimes
relent and be clement to those frail playthings that he has made, and
made so bitterly alive. Must it not be so, my dear friend, out of the
depths I cry? I feel it, now when I am most painfully conscious of his
cruelty. He must relent. He must reward. He must give some indemnity, if
it were but in the quiet of a daisy, tasting of the sun and the soft
rain and the sweet shadow of trees, for all the dire fever that he makes
us bear in this poor existence. We make too much of this human life of
ours. It may be that two clods together, two flowers together, two grown
trees together touching each other deliciously with their spread leaves,
it may be that these dumb things have their own priceless sympathies,
surer and more untroubled than ours.

I don't know quite wh