, Esq.

ST. DAVID'S, Sept. 12, 1871.

DEAR AND VENERABLE,--For it seems you grow old, and count the
diminishing days, as a bankrupt his parting ducats. I never heard you
say anything of the sort before, and have only thought of you as growing
richer in every way. I don't in any way; but though well, considering, I
find myself losing strength and good condition every year. That is why
I move about less and less, sticking closer to my own bed and board,
furnace and chimney-nook,--shelf for shoes, and pegs for coat and
trousers. [316] I am very glad to hear from you, and that you will come
and see us on your way home. Don't slip by us. Don't be miserly about
time. Odysseus took a long time for his wanderings; take a hint from the
same, not to be in a hurry.

To Mrs. David Lane.

ST. DAVID'S, Nov. 25, 1871.

DEAR me! and dear you, yet more. If I should write to you "often," what
would be the condition of us both? I very empty, and you with a great
clatter in your ears. Think of a hopper, with very little grain in it,
to keep shaking! It would be a very impolitic hopper.

I am laughing at myself, while I write this, for I am not an empty
hopper, and if I could "find it in my heart to bestow all my tediousness
upon you," you would laugh at me too. Ay, but in what sense would you
laugh? That is the question. I laugh at myself, proudly, for calling
myself empty; and you, perhaps, would laugh at me piteously, on finding
me so.

But a truce with this nonsense. Anybody will find enough to write who
will write out what is within him. Did you ever read much of German
letters,--those, for instance, of Perthes and his friends? They are full
of religion, as our American letters, I think, are not. We seem to
have been educated, especially we Unitarians, to great reserve on this
subject. I remember Channing's preaching against so much reserve. It is
partly, I believe, a reaction against profession. But there is another
reason; and that is, in religion's having become, under a more rational
culture, so a part of our whole life and thought [317] and being, that
formally to express our feelings upon it seems to us unnecessary, and
in bad taste, as if we were to say how much we love knowledge or
literature, or how much we love our friends or our children. Much talk
of this sort seems to bring a doubt, by implication, upon the very thing
talked about. Channing talked perpetually about religion,--that is,
everything ran into that,--bu