I have been lying in wait for my own imagination, this week and more,
and watching what thoughts came up in the whirl of the fancy, that
were worth communicating to you in a letter. But I am at length
convinced that my rambling head can produce nothing of that sort; so
I must e'en be content with telling you the old story, that I love
you heartily. I have often found by experience, that nature and
truth, though never so low or vulgar, are yet pleasing when openly and
artlessly represented: it would be diverting to me to read the very
letters of an infant, could it write its innocent inconsistencies and
tautologies just as it thought them. This makes me hope a letter from
me will not be unwelcome to you, when I am conscious I write with more
unreservedness than ever man wrote, or perhaps talked, to another. I
trust your good nature with the whole range of my follies, and really
love you so well, that I would rather you should pardon me than esteem
me; since one is an act of goodness and benevolence, the other a kind
of constrained deference.
You cannot wonder my thoughts are scarce consistent, when I tell you
how they are distracted. Every hour of my life my mind is strangely
divided; this minute perhaps I am above the stars, with a thousand
systems round about me, looking forward into a vast abyss, and
losing my whole comprehension in the boundless space of creation, in
dialogues with Whiston and the astronomers; the next moment I am below
all trifles, grovelling with T---- in the very centre of nonsense: now
I am recreated with the brisk sallies and quick turns of wit, which
Mr. Steele, in his liveliest and freest humours, darts about him; and
now levelling my application to the insignificant observations and
quirks of grammar of C---- and D----.
Good God! what an incongruous animal is man! how unsettled in his best
part, his soul; and how changing and variable in his frame of body!
the constancy of the one shook by every notion, the temperament of the
other affected by every blast of wind! What is he, altogether, but a
mighty inconsistency; sickness and pain is the lot of one half of him,
doubt and fear the portion of the other! What a bustle we make about
passing our time when all our space is but a point! what aims and
ambitions are crowded into this little instant of our life, which
(as Shakespeare finely worded it) is rounded with a sleep! Our whole
extent of being is no more, in the eye of Him who gave it, than a
scarce perceptible moment of duration. Those animals whose circle of
living is limited to three or four hours, as the naturalists tell us,
are yet as long-lived, and possess as wide a field of action as man,
if we consider him with a view to all space and all eternity. Who
knows what plots, what achievements a mite may perform in his kingdom
of a grain of dust, within his life of some minutes; and of how much
less consideration than even this, is the life of man in the sight of
God, who is for ever and ever?
Who that thinks in this train, but must see the world, and its
contemptible grandeurs, lessen before him at every thought? It is
enough to make one remain stupefied in a poise of inaction, void of
all desires, of all designs, of all friendships.
But we must return (through our very condition of being) to our narrow
selves, and those things that affect ourselves: our passions, our
interests flow in upon us and unphilosophize us into mere mortals. For
my part, I never return so much into myself, as when I think of
you, whose friendship is one of the best comforts I have for the
insignificancy of myself.