under full sail at this moment.

What if I should tell my last, my very recent experience with the other
sex? I received a paper containing the inner history of a young woman's
life, the evolution of her consciousness from its earliest record of
itself, written so thoughtfully, so sincerely, with so much firmness and
yet so much delicacy, with such truth of detail and such grace in the
manner of telling, that I finished the long manuscript almost at a
sitting, with a pleasure rarely, almost never experienced in voluminous
communications which one has to spell out of handwriting. This was from
a correspondent who made my acquaintance by letter when she was little
more than a child, some years ago. How easy at that early period to have
silenced her by indifference, to have wounded her by a careless epithet,
perhaps even to have crushed her as one puts his heel on a weed! A very
little encouragement kept her from despondency, and brought back one of
those overflows of gratitude which make one more ashamed of himself
for being so overpaid than he would be for having committed any of the
lesser sins. But what pleased me most in the paper lately received was
to see how far the writer had outgrown the need of any encouragement of
mine; that she had strengthened out of her tremulous questionings into a
self-reliance and self-poise which I had hardly dared to anticipate for
her. Some of my readers who are also writers have very probably had
more numerous experiences of this kind than I can lay claim to;
self-revelations from unknown and sometimes nameless friends, who write
from strange corners where the winds have wafted some stray words of
theirs which have lighted in the minds and reached the hearts of those
to whom they were as the angel that stirred the pool of Bethesda.
Perhaps this is the best reward authorship brings; it may not imply much
talent or literary excellence, but it means that your way of thinking
and feeling is just what some one of your fellow-creatures needed.

--I have been putting into shape, according to his request, some further
passages from the Young Astronomer's manuscript, some of which the
reader will have a chance to read if he is so disposed. The conflict in
the young man's mind between the desire for fame and the sense of its
emptiness as compared with nobler aims has set me thinking about the
subject from a somewhat humbler point of view. As I am in the habit of
telling you, Beloved, many of m