Tell me of your errand to the theatre at Liverpool, and how you spent the day, and how the sea treated you, and everything about everything.
God bless you, my dear.
Ever yours,
Fanny.
Bristol, Sunday, May 30th, 1847.
A thousand thanks, dear friend, for Liebig's book. You are right, I want something more to read. I finished Harriet Martineau (Oh, what ink! wait till I get some better) yesterday evening before tea, and the pamphlet on bread after I got into bed, and the "Liverpool Tragedy" (such a thing!) this morning in the railroad; so that your present of Liebig's book came to my wish and to my need, just as a gift from you should do; and I shall spend this Sunday afternoon in learning those wonderful things, and praising God for them.
I regret very much that I cannot recollect anything distinctly that I read, because the consequence is that books of an order calculated to be of the greatest use to me, books of fact and positive scientific knowledge, are really of less advantage to me than any others, because of their making no appeal to what I should call my emotional memory, and so they only profit me for the moment in which I read them. Works of imagination, of criticism, of history, and biography (even of metaphysical speculation), leave more with me than treatises of positive knowledge or scientific facts. From the others, a spirit, an animus, a general impression, a mental, moral, or intellectual accretion, remains with me; indeed, that is pretty much the whole result I obtain from anything I read. But books of knowledge, of scientific or natural facts, though they sometimes affect me beyond the finest poetry with an awe and delight that brings tears to my eyes, have but one invariable result with me, to add to my love and wonder of God. Their other uses depend, of course, upon the memory which retains and applies them subsequently, either in action or observation; and this I fail to do, by reason of forgetting: and it is a sorrow and a loss to me, because the whole world is in some sort transfigured, and life endowed with double significance, to those who are familiar with the details of the wonderful laws that govern them, and their self-communion must be as full of variety and interest as their conversation is to others.
I have infinite respect for knowledge; it is only second in value to wisdom, and to unite both is to be very fortunate—which word I use advisedly, for, though the nobler of the two, wisdom is allowed to all, knowledge is not.
I agree with you in what you say of Harriet Martineau's book: the good in it is her peculiar good (very good good it is, too), but it must be taken with the shadow of her bad upon it. It seems to me occasionally a little hard and dogmatical, and I have not liked it, upon the whole, as much as I expected, for it is rather less Christian than I expected; yet it is a very valuable book, and I was very thankful for it.
THE BAKING OF BREAD. I shall send the recipe for making effervescing bread forthwith to Lenox, to Catherine Sedgwick, who is a martyr to dyspepsia and bad baking, and who, being herself an expert cook, will know how to have the staff of life prepared from these directions, so as to support instead of piercing her, as it mostly does, up among those country operators. They never have good bread there, and are all miserable in consequence, especially herself and her brother Charles, who have delicate stomachs and cannot endure the heavy sour concoction which they are nevertheless obliged to swallow by way of daily bread. (I almost wonder how they manage to say the Lord's Prayer petition for it.)