an only assure you that you have given me a
great deal of pleasure; that you have enlarged my conception of the
sublimity of the universe, beyond any ideas I had ever before been
enabled to form.

The great simplicity of your manner of writing, I may say of your
_mind_, which appears in your writing, particularly suits the
scientific sublime--which would be destroyed by what is commonly
called fine writing. You trust sufficiently to the natural interest
of your subject, to the importance of the facts, the beauty of the
whole, and the adaptation of the means to the ends, in every part of
the immense whole. This reliance upon your reader's feeling along
with you, was to me very gratifying. The ornaments of eloquence
dressing out a sublime subject are just so many proofs either of bad
taste in the orator, or of distrust and contempt of the taste of
those whom he is trying thus to captivate.

I suppose nobody yet has completely _mastered_ the tides, therefore
I may well content myself with my inability to comprehend what
relates to them. But instead of plaguing you with an endless
enumeration of my difficulties, I had better tell you some of the
passages which gave me, ignoramus as I am, peculiar pleasure.... I
am afraid I shall transcribe your whole book if I go on to tell you
all that has struck me, and you would not thank me for that--you,
who have so little vanity, and so much to do better with your time
than to read _my_ ignorant admiration. But pray let me mention to
you a few of the passages that amused my imagination particularly,
viz., 1st, the inhabitant of Pallas _going round_ his world--or who
might go--in five or six hours in one of our steam carriages; 2nd,
the moderate-sized man who would weigh two tons at the surface of
the sun--and who would weigh only a few pounds at the surface of the
four new planets, and would be so light as to find it impossible to
stand from the excess of muscular force! I think a very entertaining
dream might be made of a man's visit to the sun and planets--these
ideas are all like dreamy feelings when one is a little feverish. I
forgot to mention (page 58) a passage on the propagation of sound.
It is a beautiful sentence, as well as a sublime idea, "so that at a
very small height above the surface of the earth, the noise of the
tempest ceas