le familiarities, those fonder leanings, which leave us, as it were,
bewildered and utterly prostrate when the beloved object is gone. But
there is here a sense of general and irreparable loss, such as the
people of a realm might be supposed to feel when its cherished head is
suddenly taken away. For I suppose that no person sustained so many
and such vital relations to the whole republic of thought, to the whole
realm of moral feeling among us, as this, our venerated teacher and
friend. To call him "that great and good man," does not meet the feeling
we have about him. Familiar to almost nobody, he was near to everybody.
His very personality seems to have been half lost in the sense of
general benefit. He was one of those great gifts of God, like sunlight
or the beauty of nature, which we scarcely know how to live without,
or in the loss of which, at least, life is sadly changed, and the world
itself is mournfully bereft.

But a letter affords no scope for such a theme; and besides, painful as
it is to pass to common topics, they claim their dues. Life, ay, common
life, must go on as it ever did, and nothing shall tear that infinite
web of mystery in which it walks enveloped. Ours, however, in these
days, is rather a shaded life. Absence from home, a strange land, a
land, too, that sits in mourning over the great relics of the past,--all
this tends to make it so. More material still is what passes within
the microcosm, and I am not yet well. Not that I am worse, for I am
continually better. But--but, in short, not to [175] speak too gravely,
if a man feels as if one of the snakes of Medusa's head were certainly
in his brain,--I have seen a horrible picture of the Medusa to-day by
Leonardo da Vinci,--he cannot be very happy, you know. And if those
around him be of such as "bear one another's burdens," then you see how
the general conscience follows.

But let me not make the picture too dark, for the sake of truth and
gratitude. Pleasantly situated we are, in his fair Florence, which grows
fairer to my eye the more I see it. Our rooms look to the south, and
down from a balcony upon a garden full of orange-trees, and roses
End chrysanthemums in full bloom. . . . Then we have reading and music
in-doors, and churches and palaces and galleries out-doors. And such
galleries they grow upon me daily; the more ordinary paintings, or those
hat seemed such at first, reveal something new on very new perusal. It
is great reading wi