or conventional epochs which used to divide my
time, and the particular days against which affection set its special
marks, are, by degrees, losing their peculiar associations for me. Even
the great division of all, death, which makes us miscall a portion of
eternity Time (as if it were different from, or other than, it), seems
less of an interruption to me than it did formerly. Is it not all one,
let us parcel it out as we will into hours, days, months, years, or
lifetimes? The boundary line exists in our narrow calculation alone. The
greatest change of all the changes we know, to mortal senses implying
almost cessation of being, to the believer in the immortality of spirit
suggests not even the idea of change, in what relates to the soul, so
much as uninterrupted progress, and the gradual lengthening of the chain
of moral consequence, inseparable from one's conception of a
responsible, rational agent, whose existence is to be eternal.

No doubt there are properties of our minds which find delight in order,
symmetry, recurring arrangement, and regular division; and the
harmonious course of the material world, alternately visited by the
sweet succession of day and night, the seasons, and all their lovely
variety of gradation, naturally creates the idea of definite periods, to
which we give definite names; but with God and with our souls there is
no time, and this material world in which our material bodies are
existing is but a shadow or reflection cast upon the surface of that
uninterrupted stream on which our true and _very selves_ are borne
onward; the real, the existing is within us.

I think it probable that the general disregard of times and seasons
formerly observed by me, in the community where I now live, may have
tended to lessen my regard for them; but, besides this, in thinking of
anniversaries connected with those I love--periods which used to appeal
to my affectionate remembrance,--I have come in a measure to feel that
to the very young alone, these marks we draw upon our life can appear
other than as the fictitious lines with which science has divided the
spheres of heaven and earth.

PHILADELPHIA, Saturday, March 18th, 1838.

Touching my picture, my dearest Harriet, I am desired to say that your
spirited defense of your right to it (whether you like it or not) is
admirable; that it certainly shall not be taken from you by force, and
that there was no intention whatever