you--I must feel that--and I cannot help chafing myself against the
thought that for me to begin to fix days in this way, just because you
have quick impulses (like all imaginative persons), and wish me to do
it now, may bring me to the catastrophe of asking you to come when you
would rather not, ... which, as you say truly, would not be an
important vexation to you; but to me would be worse than vexation; to
_me_--and therefore I shrink from the very imagination of the
possibility of such a thing, and ask you to bear with me and let it be
as I prefer ... left to your own choice of the moment. And bear with
me above all--because this shows no want of faith in you ... none ...
but comes from a simple fact (with its ramifications) ... that you
know little of me personally yet, and that _you guess_, even, but very
little of the influence of a peculiar experience over me and out of
me; and if I wanted a proof of this, we need not seek further than the
very point of discussion, and the hard worldly thoughts you thought I
was thinking of you yesterday,--I, who thought not one of them! But I
am so used to discern the correcting and ministering angels by the
same footsteps on the ground, that it is not wonderful I should look
down there at any approach of a [Greek: philia taxis] whatever to this
personal _me_. Have I not been ground down to browns and blacks? and
is it my fault if I am not green? Not that it is my _complaint_--I
should not be justified in complaining; I believe, as I told you, that
there is more gladness than sadness in the world--that is, generally:
and if some natures have to be refined by the sun, and some by the
furnace (the less genial ones) both means are to be recognised as
_good_, ... however different in pleasurableness and painfulness, and
though furnace-fire leaves scorched streaks upon the fruit. I assured
you there was nothing I had any power of teaching you: and there _is_
nothing, except grief!--which I would not teach you, you know, if I
had the occasion granted.

It is a multitude of words about nothing at all, ... this--but I am
like Mariana in the moated grange and sit listening too often to the
mouse in the wainscot. Be as forbearing as you can--and believe how
profoundly it touches me that you should care to come here at all,
much more, so often! and try to understand that if I did not write as
you half asked, it was just because I failed at the moment to get up
enough pomp and circumstance