haunted with half-subdued
suspicions that some great goggle-eyed idol, with whose worship his
whole existence has been associated, is not, what St Paul declares
it is, absolutely "nothing in world." And then you vex your soul
about these things, and worry yourself with apprehensions lest "you
should have labored in vain and spent your strength for naught"; and
lastly, trouble yourself still more lest you should lose your temper
and your patience into the bargain.

Yes, your scenery is doubtless beautiful, as the sketches you have
sent me sufficiently show; especially that scene at the foot of the
mountain Moraii or Mauroi, for I cannot quite make out the pencil-marks.
But, beautiful as they are, they are not more so than those which greet
my eye even now from my study window. No, there is no fault to be
found with external nature; it is man only who spoils it all. I see
nothing in sun, moon, or stars, in mountain, forest, or stream, that
needs to be altered; we are the blot on this fair world, "O man,"
I am sometimes ready to exclaim, "what a--"; but I check myself,
for as Correggio whispered to himself exultingly, "I also am a painter,"
so I, though with very different feelings, say, "I also am a man."
Johnson said, that every man probably worse of himself than he certainly
knows of most other men; and so I am determined that misanthropy, if
is to be indulged at all, shall, like its opposite charity, "begin
at home."

Yet, now I think better of it, it shall not begin at all; for I
recollect that HE also was a "man," who was infinitely more; who has
penetrated even this cloudy shrine of clay with the effulgence of His
glory and so let me resolve that our common humanity shall be held
sacred for His sake, and pitied for its own. Thus ends my little,
transient fit of spleen, and may it ever end.

May we feel more and more, my dearest brother, the interior presence
of that "guest of guests," that Divine Impersonation of Truth,
Rectitude, and Love, whose image has had more power to soothe and
tranquillize, stimulate and fortify, the human heart, than all the
philosophies ever devised by man; who has not merely left us rules of
conduct, expressed with incomparable force and comprehensiveness,
and illustrated by images of unequalled pathos and beauty; who was
not merely (and yet, herein alone, how superior to all other masters)
the living type of His own glorious doctrine, and affects us as we gaze
upon Him with that tran