TO THE SAME.
Cambridge, January 21, 1644.
MY DEAR ———: I am anxious to get a letter, telling me how you fare this winter in the cottage. Your neighbors who come this way do not give very favorable accounts of your looks; and, if you are well enough, I should like to see a few of those firm, well-shaped characters from your own hand. Is there no chance of your coming to Boston all this winter? I had hoped to see you for a few hours at least.
I wrote you one letter while at the West; I know not if it was ever received; it was sent by a private opportunity, one of those "traps to catch the unwary," as they have been called. It was no great loss, if lost. I did not feel like writing letters while travelling. It took all my strength of mind to keep moving and to receive so many new impressions. Surely I never had so clear an idea before of the capacity to bless, of mere Earth, when fresh from the original breath of the creative spirit. To have this impression, one must see large tracts of wild country, where the traces of man's inventions are too few and slight to break the harmony of the first design. It will not be so, long, even where I have been now; in three or four years those vast flowery plains will be broken up for tillage,—those shapely groves converted into logs and boards. I wished I could have kept on now, for two or three years, while yet the first spell rested on the scene. I feel much refreshed, even by this brief intimacy with Nature in an aspect of large and unbroken lineaments.
I came home with a treasure of bright pictures and suggestions, and seemingly well. But my strength, which had been sustained by a free, careless life in the open air, has yielded to the chills of winter, and a very little work, with an ease that is not encouraging. However, I have had the influenza, and that has been about as bad as fever to everybody. Now I am pretty well, but much writing does not agree with me.
* * * I wish you were near enough for me to go in and see you now and then. I know that, sick or well, you are always serene, and sufficient to yourself; but now you are so much shut up, it might animate existence agreeably to hear some things I might have to tell. * * *