arden, you should know that there was a very fine
house, though I cannot exactly tell you the amount of the receipts.

I miss you dreadfully, my dear H----, and I do wish you could come
back to us when Dorothy has left you; but I know that cannot be,
and so I look forward to the summer time, the sunny time, the rosy
time, when I shall be with you again at Ardgillan.

Yesterday, I read for the first time Joanna Baillie's "Count
Basil." I am not sure that the love she describes does not affect
me more even than Shakespeare's delineation of the passion in
"Romeo and Juliet." There is a nerveless despondency about it that
seems to me more intolerable than all the vivid palpitating anguish
of the tragedy of Verona; it is like dying of slow poison, or
malarial fever, compared with being shot or stabbed or even
bleeding to death, which is life pouring out from one, instead of
drying up in one's brains. I think the lines beginning--

"I have seen the last look of her heavenly eyes,"

some of the most poignantly pathetic I know. I afterward read over
again Mr. Procter's play; it is extremely well written, but I am
afraid it would not act as well as it reads. I believe I told you
that "Inez de Castro" was finally given up.

Sally and Lizzy Siddons came and sat with me for some time; they
seem well and cheerful. Their mother, they said, was not very well;
how should she be! though, indeed, regret would be selfish. Her son
is gone to fulfill his own wishes in pursuing the career for which
he was most fit; he will find in his uncle George Siddons's house
in Calcutta almost a second home. Sally, whom you know I respect
almost as much as love, said it was surprising how soon they had
learned to accept and become reconciled to their brother's
departure. Besides all our self-invoked aids of reason and
religion, nature's own provision for the need of our sorrows is
more bountiful and beneficent than we always perceive or
acknowledge. No one can go on living upon agony; we cannot grieve
for ever if we would, and our most strenuous efforts of
self-control derive help from the inevitable law of change, against
which we sometimes murmur and struggle as if it wronged our
consistency in sorrow and constancy in love. The tendency to _heal_
is as universal as th