"Your picture of domestic enjoyment indeed raises my envy. With all
my wandering habits, which are the result of circumstances rather
than of disposition, I think I was formed for an honest, domestic,
uxorious man; and I cannot hear of my old cronies snugly nestled
down with good wives and fine children round them, but I feel for
the moment desolate and forlorn. Heavens! what a hap-hazard,
schemeless life mine has been, that here I should be at this time
of life, youth slipping away, and scribbling month after month, and
year after year, far from home, without any means or prospect of
entering into matrimony, which I absolutely believe indispensable
to the happiness and even comfort of the after-part of existence."