great! He is terrible and stern; but we know also He is
good. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Your bright
little Boy, chief of your possessions here below, is rapt away
from you; but of very truth he is with God, even as we that yet
live are,--and surely in the way that was best for him, and for
you, and for all of us.--Poor Lidian Emerson, poor Mother! To
her I have no word. Such poignant unspeakable grief, I believe,
visits no creature as that of a Mother bereft of her child. The
poor sparrow in the bush affects one with pity, mourning for its
young; how much more the human soul of one's Friend! I cannot
bid her be of comfort; for there is as yet no comfort. May good
Influences watch over her, bring her some assuagement. As the
Hebrew David said, "We shall go to him, he will not return
to us."

I also am here in a house rendered vacant and sacred by Death. A
sore calamity has fallen on us, or rather has fallen on my poor
Wife (for what am I but like a spectator in comparison?): she
has lost unexpectedly her good Mother, her sole surviving Parent,
and almost only relative of much value that was left to her. The
manner too was almost tragic. We had heard of illness here, but
only of commonplace illness, and had no alarm. The Doctor
himself, specially applied to, made answer as if there was no
danger: his poor Patient, in whose character the like of that
intimately lay, had rigorously charged him to do so: her poor
Daughter was far off, confined to her room by illness of her own;
why alarm her, make her wretched? The danger itself did seem
over; the Doctor accordingly obeyed. Our first intimation of
alarm was despatched on the very day which proved the final one.
My poor Wife, casting sickness behind her, got instantly ready,
set off by the first railway train: traveling all night, on the
morrow morning at her Uncle's door in Liverpool she is met by
tidings that all is already ended. She broke down there; she
is now home again at Chelsea, a cheery, amiable younger Jane
Welsh to nurse her: the tone of her Letters is still full of
disconsolateness. I had to proceed hither, and have to stay here
till this establishment can be abolished, and all the sad wrecks
of it in some seemly manner swept away. It is above three weeks
that I have been here; not till eight days ago could I so much
as manage to command solitude, to be left altogether alone. I
lead a strange life; full of sa