DEAR FRIEND,-I am so much indebted to your good long letters, that I am ashamed to take my pen to reply. . . .
Your Sanitary Commission Report came to hand two days ago, and I began at once to read it, and finished it without stopping, greatly interested in all the details, and greatly pleased with the spirit. What a privilege to be allowed to take such a part in our great struggle! I cannot write about it, nor anything else, as I want to. I don't know why it is, but I have a strange reluctance to touch my pen. I see that the death of Miss Catherine Beecher is announced. There were fine things about her. What must she not have suffered, of late years! But I am disposed to say of the release of every aged person, "Euthanasia."
6th. I will finish this and get it off to you before Sunday. You have a great deal to do before vacation. Let me enjoin it upon you to have a vacation when the [345] time comes. Don't spend your strength and life too fast. Live to educate those fine boys. Thank you for sending us their picture. See what Furness does. That article on Immortality is as good as anything he ever wrote. Did you read the paper on the Radiometer in the last "Popular Science"? What a (not world merely) but universe do we live in! I am not willing to go out of the world without knowing all I can know of these wonders that fill alike the heavens above and every inch of space beneath. What a glorious future will it be, if we may spend uncounted years in the study of them! And, notwithstanding the weight of matter-of-fact that seems to lie against it, I think my hope of it increases. This blessed sense of what it is to be,—this sweetness of existence,-why should it be given us to be lost forever?
To the Same.
ST. DAVID'S, June 16, 1878.
. . . ONE point in your letter strikes very deep into my experience,—that in which you speak of my "standing so long upon the verge." To stand as I do, within easy reach of such stupendous possibilities,—that of being translated to another sphere of existence, or of being cut off from existence altogether and forever,—does indeed fill me with awe, and make me wonder that I am not depressed or overwhelmed by it. Habit is a stream which flows on the same, no matter how the scenery changes. It seems as if routine wore away the very sense of the words we use. We speak often of immortality; the word slides easily over our lips; but do we consider what it means? Do you ever ask yourself whether, after having lived a hundred thousands or [346] millions of years, you could still desire to go on for millions more?—whether a limited, conscious existence could bear it?
I read the foregoing, and said, "I don't see any need of considering matters so entirely out of our reach;" but the question is, can we help it? Fearfully and wonderfully are we made, but in nothing, perhaps, more than this,—that we are put upon considering questions concerning God, immortality, the mystery of life, which are so entirely beyond our reach to comprehend.
To the Same.
ST. DAVID'S, July 19, 1879.
DEAR FRIEND,—After our long silence, if it was the duty of the ghost to speak first, I think it should have been me, who am twenty years nearer to being one than you are; but it would be hardly becoming in a ghost to be as funny as you are about Henry and the hot weather. A change has come now, and the dear little fellow may put as many questions as he will. It is certainly a very extraordinary season. I remember nothing quite so remarkable.