TO THE SAME.
London, March 18, 1808.
I have this instant heard of Lady Hutchinson’s illness. I did not think I could have fretted so much about anyone out of my own circle of possessed treasures. Her conversation, her letters, above all, the silent lesson of her life, are inestimable, and can ill be spared. She is the only person I have associated with for many years from whose society I always feel better and wiser. Many others are so superior to myself that they might have that effect, but it is only with her I am sensible of it. Perhaps she is already happy, has seen my Frederick, knows everything I am now saying, and smiles at the vanity and shortsightedness of a mortal, whose faults may now be all laid open to her, stript of that veil with which we naturally seek to conceal them from those we respect and love. I think that a painful reflection on losing a friend. She will, however, see that I loved her much. My eyes fill so fast that I can hardly see what I am writing; but at the same time, without any painful emotion that is not more than counterbalanced by the consoling and elevating thoughts with which the close of such a life is contemplated. I begin to think that she left us on the night before last. This is superstition, because I had a splendid vision on that night; but why may she not have been allowed for a moment to undraw the curtains of some of our future habitations? My dream was merely that I saw a prospect before me of such exquisite beauty as this earth owns not, in which was united the softness of moonlight with the splendour of sunshine, and shaded, if I may so express it, with different degrees of golden brightness.
TO THE SAME.
March 19, 1808.
Your conversation or your letters alone animate my existence enough to prevent me from fixing my eyes steadily on the misfortune from which I date my second life, as different, certainly, from the former, as two separate modes of being. Why cannot I interest myself in what interests so many wiser and better people? I know not, and I feel I cannot walk in their path. Là-haut, là-haut—if I can but follow the bright track which may conduct me thither, little does it signify how devious or how absurd my steps appear in the eyes of mortals. I awakened this morning with an impression of him as powerful as any I felt in the beginnings of that melancholy tranquillity which followed my first distress, and it has accompanied me all day. I shall, however, struggle to divert my mind from it, and will send for some musical person in a day or two, not, like Saul, to drive away the evil spirit, but to detach my thoughts from the angelic spirit that hovers about them.
I have been very attentive to Mrs. ——. Poor woman! her old age is but melancholy. Too unsteady to fix in a place where she had friends, or indeed in any place—not deeply attached to any one, finding no pleasure in books, in intellectual conversation, nor in acts of charity, she can think of nothing but self, and at eighty, what a melancholy prospect; indeed, at what age is it not so? I have been obliged to rest from her (as poor Breteuil called it) to-day. Talking much, without going deeper than the mere dust of the earth, but just scratching the surface, fatigues me more than labour or application. I think people are not sufficiently pitied, who, with a taste for intellectual pleasures, are married to mere materialists, if you will allow me to use the word in a new sense. Everyone pities those who marry a person extremely disagreeable in externals, and surely the other misfortune is far greater, as minds come into contact at every moment of existence; and yet the world always think and talk of it as a kind of jest, when people are greatly mismatched as to understanding. I reproach myself for having done so a thousand times.