s; at the same time well knowing that
God only can touch the heart. I believe that indifference
and indolence do much shelter themselves
under pretence of leaving God's work to Himself.
I have often learned salutary lessons in doing my
little.

_2d Mo. 19th_. I have been musing upon "_my
sorrow was stirred_." Can it be that every heart is a
treasury of sadness which has but to be stirred up
to set us in mourning? Is it proportionate to the
amount of evil? Does a certain amount of evil
necessarily bring a certain amount of sorrow soon or
late? Do we suffer only by our own fault, unless
a grief is actually inflicted upon us? I think not.
There may be mental storms, over-castings of cloud
in the mind's hemisphere, independent of the exhalations
from the soil.

_2d Mo. 23d_. Letter to M.B.

* * * The truth is, that I was once fonder of reading
than of almost any thing else. * * * I don't
know how to tell thee about the strangely sad impression
that has followed, that "this also is vanity." I
know it is our duty to improve our minds, and I wish
much that mine had been better cultivated than it has
been, and yet some utilitarian infirmity of mind has so
often suggested, "What use is it?" while I have been
reading, that my zest for the book has been almost destroyed,
and the very thought of the volume has been
saddened by remembering what I felt while reading it.
So that what E. Barrett says of light reading is true to
me of Schiller and some others:--

"Merry books once read for pastime,
If we dared to read again,
Only memories of the last time,
Would swim darkly up the brain."

I hope these feelings are not infectious, or I certainly
would not inflict on thee the description. But do not
take this as a _general_ picture of me. It is a morbid
occasional state of things; consequent, by reaction, on
the exclusiveness of aim with which those things were
followed. I learned sooner than I suppose many do,
the earnestness, coldness, reality of life; and there has
come an impression of its being _too late_ to prepare for
life, and quite time to live. However imperfectly, I have
learned that to live _ought_ to be to prepare to die; but,
without stopping to describe how that idea has acted, a
secondary purpose of being of some use to others has. I
might almost say, tormented my faculty of conscientiousness.
Don't suppose