messages can arrive at all; that a little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods, and other inextricable confusions, and come at last, in the hand of the Twopenny Postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green leaf in the bill of Noah’s Dove?  Let us be grateful for mercies; let us use them while they are granted us.  Time was when “they that feared the Lord spake often one to another.”  A friendly thought is the purest gift that man can afford to man.  “Speech” also, they say, “is cheerfuler than light itself.”

The date of your letter gives me unhappily no idea but that of Space and Time.  As you know my whereabout, will you throw a little light on your own?  I can imagine Boston, and have often seen the musket volleys on Bunker Hill; but in this new spot there is nothing for me save sky and earth, the chance of retirement, peace, and winter seclusion.  Alas!  I can too well fancy one other thing:  the bereavement you allude to, the sorrow that will so long be painful before it can become merely sad and sacred.  Brothers, especially in these days, are much to us:  had one no brother, one could hardly understand what it was to have a Friend; they are the Friends whom Nature chose for us; Society and Fortune, as things now go, are scarcely compatible with Friendship, and contrive to get along, miserably enough, without it.  Yet sorrow not above measure for him that is gone.  He is, in very deed and truth, with God,—­where you and I both are.  What a thin film it is that divides the Living from the Dead!  In still nights, as Jean Paul says, “the limbs of my Buried Ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin.”  Let us turn back into Life.

That you sit there bethinking yourself, and have yet taken no course of activity, and can without inward or outward hurt so sit, is on the whole rather pleasing news to me.  It is a great truth which you say, that Providence can well afford to have one sit:  another great truth which you feel without saying it is that a course wherein clear faith cannot go with you may be worse than none; if clear faith go never so slightly against it, then it is certainly worse than none.  To speak with perhaps ill-bred candor, I like as well to fancy you not preaching to Unitarians a Gospel after their heart.  I will say farther, that you are the only man I ever met with of that persuasion whom I could unobstructedly like.  The others that I have seen were all a kind of halfway-house characters, who, I thought, should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in unbelief; in “faint possible Theism,” which I like considerably worse than Atheism.  Such, I could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate:  to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat....  Nay, who knows but it is doubts of the like kind in your own mind that keep you for a time inactive even