trophes; Divisions of capital invested in failing securities,
or unlucky speculations; instead of attending to all which in their
purely business aspect, my imagination flies off to the dramatic,
passionate, human element involved in such accidents, and I think of all
manner of plays and novels, instead of "Cash Accounts," to be extracted
therefrom....

Good-bye, dearest H----.

Ever affectionately yours,
F. A. B.

BRANCHTOWN, May 1st, 1835.
DEAREST EMILY,

Reflecting upon the loss I have sustained in the death of my dear Dall,
you exclaim, "How difficult it is to realize that life has become
eternity, hope is become certainty! How strange, how impossible, it
seems to conceive a state of existence without expectation, and where
all is fulfillment!" I have marked under the word "_impossible_,"
because such a belief is literally impossible to my mind; the sense of
activity, of desire for, and aiming at, and striving after something
better than what I am, is so essential a portion of the idea of
happiness to me that I absolutely can conceive of no happiness but in
the attempt at, and consciousness of, progress. The state where that
hope did not exist, and where the spiritual energies were not presented
with deeper and higher objects of attainment, would be no state of
enjoyment to me. I cannot imagine heaven without inexhaustible means of
increasing knowledge and excellence.... Perhaps in that state, dear
Emily, we shall be able to find out how a mummy of the days of Memnon
should have preserved in its dead grasp a living germ for 3000 years....
[This last sentence referred to a striking fact, which Miss Fitz Hugh's
uncle, Mr. William Hamilton, told us, of a bulb found in the sarcophagus
of a mummy, which was planted, and actually began to germinate and
grow.]

BRANCHTOWN, May 27th, 1835.
MY DEAREST H----,

... It is curious that in a comparatively inactive state of life, the
sense of the infinite business _of living_ has become far more vivid to
me than it ever was before; existence seems so abounding in duties, in
objects of interest and energy, in means of excellence and
pleasure--happiness, I ought rather to say,--the immense and important
happiness of constant endeavor after improvement.... Dear H----, my
letter was interrup