I have not yet, I am sorry to say, found “The Stone Mason of Saint Point,” though I have sought for it a great deal. By whom is it published?
Please remember me to my friends. I often wish myself near the Doctor with my difficulties in science. Tell Allie Mr. Muir does not forget him.
Trout’s Mills, near Meaford,
September 13th, [1866.]
Your precious letter with its burden of cheer and good wishes has come to our hollow, and has done for me that work of sympathy and encouragement which I know you kindly wished it to do. It came at a time when much needed, for I am subject to lonesomeness at times. Accept, then, my heartfelt gratitude—would that I could make better return!
I am sorry over the loss of Professor Stirling’s letter, for I waited and wearied for it a long time. I have been keeping up an irregular course of study since leaving Madison, but with no great success. I do not believe that study, especially of the Natural Sciences, is incompatible with ordinary attention to business; still I seem to be able to do but one thing at a time. Since undertaking a month or two ago to invent new machinery for our mill, my mind seems to so bury itself in the work that I am fit for but little else; and then a lifetime is so little a time that we die ere we get ready to live. I would like to go to college, but then I have to say to myself, “You will die ere you can do anything else.” I should like to invent useful machinery, but it comes, “You do not wish to spend your lifetime among machines and you will die ere you can do anything else.” I should like to study medicine that I might do my part in helping human misery, but again it comes, “You will die ere you are ready or able to do so.” How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt! but again the chilling answer is reiterated; but could we but live a million of years, then how delightful to spend in perfect contentment so many thousand years in quiet study in college, as many amid the grateful din of machines, as many among human pain, so many thousand in the sweet study of Nature among the dingles and dells of Scotland, and all the other less important parts of our world! Then perhaps might we, with at least a show of reason, “shuffle off this mortal coil” and look back upon our star with something of satisfaction; I should be ashamed—if shame might be in the other world—if any of the powers, virtues, essences, etc., should ask me for common knowledge concerning our world which I could not bestow. But away with this aged structure and we are back to our handful of hasty years half gone, all of course for the best did we but know all of the Creator’s plan concerning us. In our higher state of existence we shall have time and intellect for study. Eternity, with perhaps the whole unlimited creation of God as our field, should satisfy us, and make us patient and trustful, while we pray with the Psalmist, “Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
I was struck with your remarks about our real home of stillness and peace. How little does the outer and noisy world in general know of that “real home” and real inner life! Happy indeed they who have a friend to whom they can unmask the workings of their real life, sure of sympathy and forbearance!
I sent for the book which you recommend; I have just been reading a short sketch of the life of the mother of Lamartine.
You say about the humble life of our Saviour and about the trees gathering in the sunshine. These are beautiful things.
What you say respecting the littleness of the number who are called to “the pure and deep communion of the beautiful, all-loving Nature,” is particularly true of the hardworking, hard-drinking, stolid Canadians. In vain is the glorious chart of God in Nature spread out for them. So many acres chopped is their motto, as they grub away amid the smoke of the magnificent forest trees, black as demons and material as the soil they move upon. I often think of the Doctor’s lecture upon the condition of the different races of men as controlled by physical agencies. Canada, though abounding in the elements of wealth, is too difficult to subdue to permit the first few generations to arrive at any great intellectual development. In my long rambles last summer I did not find a single person who knew anything of botany and but a few who knew the meaning of the word; and wherein lay the charm that could conduct a man who might as well be gathering mammon so many miles through these fastnesses to suffer hunger and exhaustion was with them never to be discovered. Do not these answer well to the person described by the poet in these lines?
“A primrose by the river’s brim,