pricious as possible, and
at this moment hardly a fruit-tree is in blossom or a lilac-tree in bud;
and looking abroad over the landscape, 'tis only here and there that I
can detect faint symptoms of that exquisite green haze which generally
seems to hang like a halo over the distant woods at this season. I do
not remember so backward a spring since I have been in this country. I
do not complain of it, however, though everybody else does; for the
longer the annihilating heat of the summer keeps off, the better the
weather suits me. Will you not come over and spend the summer with me,
now that the sea voyage is only half as long as it was? Come, and we
will go to Niagara together, and you shall be half roasted alive for
full five months, an effectual warming through, I should think, for the
rest of the year. Dear Harriet, Niagara is the one thing of its kind for
which no fellow has yet been found in the world, and to see it is
certainly worth a fortnight's sea-sickness. I cannot say more in its
praise.

You speak of the sufferings of your wretched Irish population; and
because patience, fortitude, benevolence, charity, and many good fruits
spring from that bitter root, you seem to be reconciled to the fact that
ignorance and imprudence are the real causes from which the greater part
of this frightful misery proceeds.

Though God's infinite mercy has permitted that even our very errors and
sins may become, if we please, sources of virtue in, and therefore of
good to, us, do you not think that our nature, such as He has seen fit
to form it, with imperfection in its very essence, and such a transition
as death in its experience, furnishes us with a sufficient task in the
mere ceaseless government and education which it requires, without our
superadding to this difficult charge the culpability of infinite
neglect, the absolute damage and injury and all the voluntary
deterioration, sin, and sorrow which we inflict upon ourselves?

Why are we to charge God with all these things, or conceive it possible
that He ordained a state of existence in which mercy's supplication
would be that sudden death might sweep a hundred sufferings of worse
kind from the face of the earth?

God is unwearied in producing good; and we can so little frustrate His
determinate and omnipotent goodness, that out of our most desperate
follies and wickednesses the ultimate result is sure to be
preponderating good; but does this excuse the sinners and fo