GREAT RUSSELL STREET, December 18. 
     DEAR H——­,

I have had time to write neither long nor short letters for the last week; Mr. Young’s engagement being at an end, I have been called back to my work, and have had to rehearse, and to act, and to be much too busy to write to you until to-day, when I have caught up all my arrears.

My father, thank God, is once more recovering, but we have twice been alarmed at such sudden relapses that we hardly dare venture to hope he is really convalescent.  Inflammation on the lungs has, it seems, been going on for a considerable time, and though they think now that it has entirely subsided, yet, as the least exertion or exposure may bring it on again, we are watching him like the apples of our eyes.  He has not yet left his bed, to which he has now been confined more than a month....

The exertion I have been obliged to make when leaving him to go and act, was so full of misery and dread lest I should find him worse, perhaps dead, on my return, that no words can describe what I have suffered at that dreadful theater.  Thank God, however, he is now certainly better, out of present danger, and I trust and pray will soon be beyond any danger of a relapse.  Anything like Dall’s incessant and unwearied care and tenderness you cannot imagine.  Night and day she has watched and waited on him, and I think she must have sunk under all the fatigue she has undergone but for the untiring goodness and kindness of heart that has supported her under it all.  She is invaluable to us all, and every day adds to her claims upon our love and gratitude....

In the passage you quote from Godwin, he seems to think a friend of more use in reproving what is evil in us than I believe is really the case.  Do you think our faults and follies can ever be more effectually sifted, analyzed, and condemned by another than by our own conscience?  I do not think if one could put one’s heart into one’s friends’ hand that they could detect one defect or evil quality that had not been marked and acknowledged in the depths of one’s own consciousness.  Do you suppose people shrink more from the censure of others than from self-condemnation?  I find it difficult to think so....  You appear to me always to wish to submit your faith to a process which invariably breaks your apparatus and leaves you very much dissatisfied, with your faith still a simple element in you, in spite of your endeavors to analyze or decompose it.  Are not, after all, our convictions our only steadfastly grounded faith?  I do not mean conviction wrought out in the loom of logical argument, where one’s understanding must have shuttled backward and forward through every thread a thousand times before the woof is completed, but the spiritual convictions, the intuitions of our souls, that lie upon their surface like direct reflections from heaven, distinct and beautiful enough for reverent