ufficient tendency
to superstition by your presentiment when you last left us that you
should never return to this house. There is some talk now of our
leaving it. My mother yearns for her favorite suburban haunts, the
scene of her courtship, and the spot where most of her happy
youthful associations abide, and has half persuaded my father to
let this house and take one in a particular row of "cottages of
gentility" called Craven Hill. It only consists of twelve houses,
in _five_ of which my mother has, at different periods of her life,
resided. This is all vague at present; I will let you know if it
assumes a more definite shape. Some time will elapse before it is
decided on, and more before it is done; and in any case, somehow or
other, you must be once more under this roof with us before we
leave it....

I quite agree with you that such books as Mr. Hope's (on the nature
and immortality of the soul, the precise title of which I have
forgotten) "may be useless," and sometimes, indeed, worse. If a
person has nothing better to do than count the sea sands or fill
the old bottomless tub of the Danaides, they may be excused for
devoting their time and wits to such riddles, perhaps. But when the
mind has positive, practical work to perform, and time keeps
bringing _all the time_ specific duties, or when, as in your case,
a predisposition to vague speculation is the intellectual besetting
sin, I think _addition_ to such subjects to be avoided. I suppose
all human beings have, in some shape or degree, the desire for that
knowledge which is still the growth of the forbidden tree of
Paradise, and the lust for which inevitably thrusts us against the
bars of the material life in which we are consigned; but to give up
one's time to writing and reading elaborate theories of a past and
future which we may conceive to exist, but of the existence of
which it is impossible we should achieve _any_ proof, much less any
detailed knowledge, appears to me an unprofitable and
unsatisfactory misuse of time and talent....

You are mistaken in supposing me familiar with the early history of
Poland. I am ashamed to say I know nothing about it, and my zeal
for the cause of its people is an ignorant sentiment_alism_--partly,
perhaps, mere innate combativeness that longs