e had in the last dream that preceded his last sleep.

Almost the saddest to me of all the items of ruin and destruction
enumerated in the newspaper records of the late storm, was the carrying
away of the Menai Bridge, and that on your account. I thought of it as
almost a personal loss and grief to you. You had so often described it
to me, its beauty and its grandeur; and though I had never seen it, I
had a distinct imagination of it, gathered far more from your
descriptions, than from engravings or accounts of tourists: and it was
so associated with you in my mind, that, reading of it being all blown
to tatters, I felt dismayed to think of _your_ beautiful bridge thus
ruined, and of your distress at its destruction. You used to speak of
that with the same species of delight that beautiful natural objects
excite in me: and enjoyment so vivid, and at the same time so abiding,
that I sometimes, under the influence of such impressions, feel as if I
loved some places better than any people. Certainly the magical effect
of certain beautiful scenes upon my mind is the most intense and lasting
pleasure I have ever known....

I returned here yesterday to my children, whom I left with Margery,
while I went up to Butler's Island to do duty, I am sorry to say, as
sick-nurse....

The observations of children, which are quoted as indications of
peculiar intelligence, very often only appear so, because the objects
which call them forth, having become familiar to us, have ceased to
impress us rightly, or perhaps at all. Every child who is not a fool
will frequently make remarks about many things which are only striking
because conventional uses and educated habits of thought have, on many
points, blunted their effect upon us, and obscured our perceptions of
their qualities, and left us with duller senses, and a duller general
sense in some respects, than those of a child or savage....

I have been performing an office this morning, which, like sundry others
I have been called upon to discharge here (marking on the carcass of a
sheep, for instance, the proper joints into which it should be cut for
the table), is new to me. I read prayers to between twenty and thirty of
the slaves, who are here without church, pastor, or any means whatever
of religious instruction. There was something so affecting to me in my
involuntary relation to these poor people,--in the contrast, too,
between the infirm old age of many of them, and the comparat