t will so long be painful before it can become merely sad and
sacred. Brothers, especially in these days, are much to us: had
one no brother, one could hardly understand what it was to have a
Friend; they are the Friends whom Nature chose for us; Society
and Fortune, as things now go, are scarcely compatible with
Friendship, and contrive to get along, miserably enough, without
it. Yet sorrow not above measure for him that is gone. He is,
in very deed and truth, with God,--_where_ you and I both are.
What a thin film it is that divides the Living from the Dead! In
still nights, as Jean Paul says, "the limbs of my Buried Ones
touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands
heal eruptions of the skin." Let us turn back into Life.

That you sit there bethinking yourself, and have yet taken no
course of activity, and can without inward or outward hurt so
sit, is on the whole rather pleasing news to me. It is a great
truth which you say, that Providence can well afford to have one
sit: another great truth which you feel without saying it is
that a course wherein clear faith cannot go with you may be worse
than none; if clear faith go never so slightly against it, then
it is certainly worse than none. To speak with perhaps ill-bred
candor, I like as well to fancy you _not_ preaching to Unitarians
a Gospel after their heart. I will say farther, that you are the
only man I ever met with of that persuasion whom I could
unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen were all a kind
of halfway-house characters, who, I thought, should, if they had
not wanted courage, have ended in unbelief; in "faint possible
Theism," which I like considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I
could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat
fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as
a rat.... Nay, who knows but it is doubts of the like kind in
your own mind that keep you for a time inactive even now? For
the rest, that you have liberty to choose by your own will
merely, is a great blessing: too rare for those that could use
it so well; nay, often it is difficult to use. But till _ill
health_ of body or of mind warns you that the moving, not the
sitting, position is essential, _sit_ still, contented in
conscience; understanding well that no man, that God only knows
_what_ we are working, and will show it one day; that such and
such a one, who filled the whole Earth with his hamm