You are coming to England, and you will certainly not do so again without coming to us.  My father and mother, you know, speak by me when I assure you that a visit from you would give us all the greatest pleasure....  Do not come late in the season to us, because at present we do not know whether June or July may take us out of town....  With my scheme of going to America, I think I can look the future courageously in the face.  It is something to hold one’s fortune in one’s own hands; if the worst comes to the worst it is but another year’s drudgery, and the whereabouts really matters little....  We hear that the cholera is in Edinburgh.  I cannot help thinking with the deepest anxiety of those I love there, and I imagine with sorrow that beautiful, noble city, those breezy hills, those fresh, sea-weedy shores and coasts breathed upon by that dire pestilence.  The city of the winds, where the purifying currents of keen air sweep through every thoroughfare and eddy round every corner—­perched up so high upon her rocky throne, she seems to sit in a freer, finer atmosphere than all the world beside! (I appear, in my enthusiastic love for Edinburgh, to have forgotten those Immonderraze, the wynds and closes of the old town.) I hope the report may not prove true, though from a letter I have received from my cousin Sally (Siddons) the plague is certainly within six miles of them.  She writes very rationally about it, and I can scarce forbear superstitiously believing that God’s mercy will especially protect those who are among His most devoted and dutiful children....

You speak of my love of nature almost as if it were a quality for which I deserve commendation.  It is a blessing for which I am most grateful.  You who live uninclosed by paved streets and brick walls, who have earth, sea, and sky a discretion spread round you in all their majestic beauty, cannot imagine how vividly my memory recalls and my mind dwells upon mere strips of greensward, with the shadows of trees lying upon them.  The colors of a patch of purple heather, broken banks by roadsides through which sunshine streamed—­often mere effects of light and shade—­return to me again and again like tunes, and to shut my eyes and look at them is a perfect delight to me.  I suppose one is in some way the better as well as the happier for one’s sympathy with the fair things of this fair world, which are types of things yet fairer, and emanations from the great Source of all goodness, loveliness, and sublimity.  Whether in the moral or material universe, images and ideas of beauty must always be in themselves good.  Beauty is one manifestation and form of truth, and the transition seems to me almost inevitable from the contemplation of things that are lovely to one’s senses to those which are lovable by one’s spirits’ higher and finer powers of apprehension.  The mind is kept sunny and calm, and free from ill vapors, by the influence of beautiful things;