To Rev. William Ware.
SHEFFIELD, Oct. 13, 1850.
"THAT'S what I will," I said, as I took up your letter just now, to
read it again, thinking you had desired me to write immediately. "How
affectionate!" thinks I to myself; "that must have been a good letter
that I wrote him last; I really think some of my letters must be pretty
good ones, after all; I hate conceit,--I really believe my tendency is
the other way,-but, hang it! who knows but I may turn out, upon myself,
a fine letter after all? But at any rate Ware loves me, does n't he?
He wants me to write a few lines, at least, very soon. It's evident he
would be pleased to have me, pleased as the Laird of Ellangowan said of
the king's commission,--good honest gentle-[220] man, he can't be more
pleased than I am!" But oh! the slips of those who are shodden with
vanity! I read on, thinking it was a nice letter of yours,--feeling
something startled, to be sure, at the compellation, as if you were
mesmerise, and had got an insight (calls me bambino half of the
time)--looking at your mood reverential as a droll jest,--vexed at
first, but then reconciled, about the book and the lecturing,--charmed
and grateful beyond measure at what you say about your health,--when!
at last!! I fell upon your request: "Now give me one brief epistle
between this and our seeing you."!!! BETWEEN! what a word! what a
hiatus! what a gulf! Down into it tumbled pride, vanity, pleasure,
everything. Well, great occasions call out virtue. As I emerged, as I
came up, I came up a hero; the vanities of this world were all struck
off from me in my fall, and I came up a hero; for I determined I would
write to you immediately. There! beat that if you can! I give you a
chance,-one chance,--I don't ask YOU to write at all.
What is it you call my study now-a-days,--"terrible moral metaphysics
"? You may well say "weighed down" with them. I was never in my life
before quite so modest as I am now. Not that I have n't enough to say,
and all my faculties leap to the task; but all the while there looms up
before me an ideal of what such a course of lectures might be, that I
fear I shall never reach up to, no, nor one twentieth part of the way
to it. . . .
[221]To Mrs. David Lane.
SHEFFIELD, Jan. 25, 1851.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--You won't come, and I will write to you! See the
difference. See how I return good for evil!
I say, you won't come; for I have a letter from Mrs. Curtis, from
which it is evident the will not, and so I suppose that laudable
conspiracy falls to the ground. However, we shall sort o' look for
you all the week. But you won't come. I know it to my fingers' ends.
Cradled in luxury, wrapped in comfort, enervated by city indulgences,
sophisticated by fashionable society--well, I won't finish the essay;
but you won't come.
Ah! speaking of fashionable society,--that reminds me,--you ask a
question, and say, "Answer me." Well, then,--society we must have; and
all the question I should have to ask about it would be whether it
pleased me,--not whether everybody in it pleased me, but whether its
general tone did not offend me, and then, whether I could find persons
in it with whose minds I could have grateful and good intercourse. If
I could, I don't think the word "fashion," or the word "world," would
scare me. As to the time given to it, and the time to be reserved
for weightier matters, that is, to be sure, very material. But the
chief thing is a reigning spirit in our life, gained from communion
with the highest thoughts and themes, which consecrates all time, and
subordinates all events and circumstances, and hallows all intercourse,
and turns the dust of life into golden treasures.
I have no thoughts of going to New York or anywhere [222] else at
present. I finished my eighth lecture yesterday. This is my poor
service to the world in these days,-since you insist that I have
relations to the world.