Roehampton, Oct. 7, 1822.
Your kind letter feelingly pourtrays the lights and shades of human life. It describes two most affecting strokes of final separation as to this world—softened, however, by the piety and resignation of the departed, and the consciousness of past kindness in the survivors, the only real sources of consolation, except those living waters from whence flows comfort, unexpected, inexhaustible, and indescribable.
Of these calamities I hope the severity is passing away, though I know from experience how deep must have been the wound which divided you from your early friend; while, on the contrary, the happy marriage of your daughter seems the foundation and commencement of future felicity. May you enjoy as much of it as is consistent with the conditions of human life.
I am now in the very spot where I felt so many pangs at this season last year; and I am pleased to see in her whom Providence has sent to take my dear friend’s place, one whom she would, I think, have chosen out of a thousand. She is grand-daughter, on one side, of Lord Carlisle, a man of taste and letters; on the other, of the admired Duchess of Devonshire, whose pictures she resembles. Her gentleness, good sense, amiable simplicity of manners, her unaffected grace, and watchful acquiescence in all the orderly, quiet, retired, and literary habits of the house, are delightful.
Pray let me soon have a line about your young lovers; I love to hear of happiness. I smiled at reading in your letter, ‘I am no manœuvrer.’ It is as if the sun should say, ‘I do not shed darkness.’ At the same time, I am pleased to find thus incidentally that your new relation unites, with more essential points, those which the world thinks worth seeking after.
The following letter is a reply to one from a friend of her youth, giving an account of a painful and perilous operation just undergone.
TO MRS. ——.
Roehampton, Oct. 9, 1822.
There are certain unexpected feelings in which admiration, pity, sorrow, and surprise, are so intimately blended as to make it impossible for us to describe them. Such your letter, which is now before me, and of which I shall never forget even the shape and character, is well calculated to excite. For a moment it stunned me, and when tears brought back the more precise consciousness of all you have so nobly endured, the crowd of ideas and images that pressed upon me, gave to minutes the fulness of years.