My dearest Friend,--I have lived to see the close of the third year of
our separation. This is a melancholy anniversary to me, and many tender
scenes arise in my mind upon the recollection. I feel unable to sustain
even the idea that it will be half that period ere we meet again. Life
is too short to have the dearest of its enjoyments curtailed; the social
feelings grow callous by disuse, and lose that pliancy of affection
which sweetens the cup of life as we drink it. The rational pleasures of
friendship and society, and the still more refined sensations of which
delicate minds only are susceptible, like the tender blossoms, when the
rude northern blasts assail them, shrink within and collect themselves
together, deprived of the all-cheering and beamy influence of the sun.
The blossom falls and the fruit withers and decays; but here the
similitude fails, for, though lost for the present, the season returns,
the tree vegetates anew, and the blossom again puts forth.
But, alas! with me, those days which are past are gone forever, and time
is hastening on that period when I must fall to rise no more until
mortality shall put on immortality, and we shall meet again, pure and
disembodied spirits. Could we live to the age of the antediluvians, we
might better support this separation; but, when threescore years and ten
circumscribe the life of man, how painful is the idea that, of that
short space, only a few years of social happiness are our allotted
portion.
Perhaps I make you unhappy. No. You will enter with a soothing
tenderness into my feelings. I see in your eyes the emotions of your
heart, and hear the sigh that is wafted across the Atlantic to the bosom
of Portia. But the philosopher and the statesman stifles these emotions,
and regains a firmness which arrests my pen in my hand.