'_March_, 1842.--My inward life has been more rich and deep,
and of more calm and musical flow than ever before. It seems
to me that Heaven, whose course has ever been to cross-bias
me, as Herbert said, is no niggard in its compensations. I
have indeed been forced to take up old burdens, from which I
thought I had learned what they could teach; the pen has been
snatched from my hand just as I most longed to use it; I have
been forced to dissipate, when I most wished to concentrate;
to feel the hourly presence of others' mental wants, when, it
seemed, I was just on the point of satisfying my own. But a
new page is turned, and an era begun, from which I am not yet
sufficiently remote to describe it as I would. I have lived a
life, if only in the music I have heard, and one development
seemed to follow another therein, as if bound together by
destiny, and all things were done for me. All minds, all
scenes, have ministered to me. Nature has seemed an
ever-open secret; the Divine, a sheltering love; truth, an
always-springing fountain; and my soul more alone, and less
lonely, more hopeful, patient, and, above all, more gentle and
humble in its living. New minds have come to reveal themselves
to me, though I do not wish it, for I feel myself inadequate
to the ties already formed. I have not strength or time to
meet the thoughts of those I love already. But these new have
come with gifts too fair to be refused, and which have cheered
my passive mind.'
* * * * *
'_June_, 1844.--Last night, in the boat, I could not help
thinking, each has something, none has enough. I fear to want
them all; and, through ages, if not forever, promises and
beckons the life of reception, of renunciation. Passing every
seven days from one region to the other, the maiden grows
weary of _packing the trunk_, yet blesses Thee, O rich God!'
Her letters at this period betray a pathetic alternation of feeling,
between her aspiring for a rest in the absolute Centre, and her
necessity of a perfect sympathy with her friends. She writes to one of
them:--
'What I want, the word I crave, I do not expect to hear from
the lips of man. I do not wish to be, I do not wish to have,
a _mediator_; yet I cannot help wishing, when I am with you,
that some tones of the longed-for music could be vibrating
in the air around us. But I will not be impatient again; for,
though I am but as I am, I like not to feel the eyes I have
loved averted.'