has now been
confined more than a month....

The exertion I have been obliged to make when leaving him to go and
act, was so full of misery and dread lest I should find him worse,
perhaps dead, on my return, that no words can describe what I have
suffered at that dreadful theater. Thank God, however, he is now
certainly better, out of present danger, and I trust and pray will
soon be beyond any danger of a relapse. Anything like Dall's
incessant and unwearied care and tenderness you cannot imagine.
Night and day she has watched and waited on him, and I think she
must have sunk under all the fatigue she has undergone but for the
untiring goodness and kindness of heart that has supported her
under it all. She is invaluable to us all, and every day adds to
her claims upon our love and gratitude....

In the passage you quote from Godwin, he seems to think a friend of
more use in reproving what is evil in us than I believe is really
the case. Do you think our faults and follies can ever be more
effectually sifted, analyzed, and condemned by another than by our
own conscience? I do not think if one could put one's heart into
one's friends' hand that they could detect one defect or evil
quality that had not been marked and acknowledged in the depths of
one's own consciousness. Do you suppose people shrink more from the
censure of others than from self-condemnation? I find it difficult
to think so.... You appear to me always to wish to submit your
faith to a process which invariably breaks your apparatus and
leaves you very much dissatisfied, with your faith still a simple
element in you, in spite of your endeavors to analyze or decompose
it. Are not, after all, our convictions our only steadfastly
grounded faith? I do not mean conviction wrought out in the loom of
logical argument, where one's understanding must have shuttled
backward and forward through every thread a thousand times before
the woof is completed, but the spiritual convictions, the
intuitions of our souls, that lie upon their surface like direct
reflections from heaven, distinct and beautiful enough for reverent
contemplation, but a curious search into whose nature would, at any
rate temporarily, blur and dissipate and destroy....

The sense of power which man cannot control is one