it out, if you please, but
makes a dragging business of it. By the bye, is your laziness making an
apology for not finishing "Scenes in Judea "? Hear a compliment of my
mother's for your encouragement. "I should think the man that could
write the Letters from Palmyra,'--anything so beautiful and so powerful
too" (her very words),--"could write anything."

I am delighted to hear of Mr. Farrar's being better. Give my love to
them, and tell him I know of nothing in the world I could near with more
pleasure than of his improvement. What a beautiful, gentle, precious
spirit he is!

Yes, I grant you all about Cambridge; and if I don't go abroad, perhaps
we will come and live with you a year or two. Something I must do; I get
no better.

I can't guess your plaguy charade. I never thought of one a minute
before, and I have ruminated upon yours an hour. [167] Oh that you were
my colleague, or I yours, as you please!

With our love to your wife and children,

I am as ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To Dr. Channing.

NEW YORK, Sept. 30, 1841.

MY DEAR SIR,--I cannot go away for two years without taking leave of
you. I wish I could do so by going to see you. But my decision to go
is not more than three weeks old, and the intervening time has been
overwhelmed with cares. Among other things, I have been occupied with
printing a volume of sermons. I feel as if it were a foolish thing to
confess, but I imagined that I had something to say about "human life"
(that is my subject), though I warrant you will find it little enough.
But then, you are accustomed to say so much better things than the rest
of us, that you ought to distrust your judgment.

I sail for Havre on the 8th October with my family.

I am extremely glad to learn from Mrs. G. that your health is so good,
and that you pass some time every day with your pen in hand. The world,
I believe, is to want for its guidance more powerful writing, during
twenty years to come, than it has ever wanted before, or will again, and
I hope you will be able to do your part. Perhaps this is speaking more
oracularly than becomes my ignorance; but it does appear to me that the
civilized world is on the eve of a change and a progress, putting all
past data at fault, and outstripping all present imagination. What
questions are to arise and to be [168] hotly agitated about human
rights, social position, lawful government, and the laws that are to
press man down or to help him up? What Brown