VI
Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor [March 19, 1857].
Thanks, my dear Friend, for your having remembered my name's day [St Joseph's Day]. I don't know why, but every anniversary concerning myself finds me very sad: those friendly whisperings are checking the tendency.
The box has arrived. You have made out the only point of contact between Shakespeare and myself, on all the rest we deeply differ. He was an extraordinary poet: I am not. He was—spite of your interpretations—calm:[50] I am not. He looked on the world from above: I look at it from within and want to make a revolution. He was—if reports are correct—merrily poaching: I have always before my eyes, like a remorse, the large convulsion with which a poor thrush, shot by me at the age of sixteen, was twisting with her beak a bit of grass. He was the Lord of Individuality: all my tendency, if developed, would have been a generalising one. He was powerful: I am powerless—and so on, to the end of the chapter.—your friend,
Joseph Mazzini.
VII
Two Letters to Mrs Milner-Gibson
(Translated from the French)
[Mrs Milner-Gibson had just lost a little boy. Mazzini was godfather to a younger brother.]
[April 15, 1859.]
Dear Friend,—What can I say? You believe, as I do, in God and immortality. It is there that you must find your comfort and strength. Love your boy as if he were alive, for in that you will have what will restore him to you in the series of existences, which follows this one. Become even better than you are by thinking of him, for this will make a bond of love and mutual influence between you and him. Think of him when you are doing good. Think of him, when impulses of selfishness or human frailty assail you. Be good and strong. Give your other children the love he gave them himself. And count on God. There is immortality to link the mother and the child, and only forgetfulness can break it. I have heard of his last words and kisses: he loved you to his last moment, love him to yours, and believe it, this will have been but the parting for a journey.