I could do for you there I could do all along the way home and since I have got here:  love you, be sorry for you, and constantly pray for you.  I am sure that He who has so sorely afflicted you accepts the patience with which you bear the rod, and that when this first terrible amazement and bewilderment are over, and you can enter into communion and fellowship with Him, you will find a joy in Him that, hard as it is to the flesh to say so, transcends all the sweetest and best joys of human life.  You will have nothing to do now but to fly to Him.  I have seen the time when I could hide myself in Him as a little child hides in its mother’s arms, and so have thousands of aching hearts.  In all our afflictions He is afflicted.  But I must not weary you with words.  May God bless and keep you, and fully reveal Himself unto you!

To Miss.  E. A. Warner, New York, Nov. 2, 1868.

I have been lying on the sofa in my room, half asleep, and feeling rather guilty at the lot of gas I was wasting, but too lazy or too tired to get up to turn it down.  Your little “spray” hangs right over the head of my bed, an it was it was slightly dilapidated by its journey hither, I have tucked in a bit of green fern with it to remind me that I was not always in the sere and yellow leaf, but had a spring-time once.  To think of your going for to go and write verses to me in my old age!  I have just been reading them over and think it was real good of you to up and say such nice things in such a nice way.  I’d no idea you could! We did not come home from Rochester through Boston; if we had done so I meant to go and see you.  I made it up in many loving thoughts to you on our twelve hours’ journey.  Poor Mrs. L. met me with open arms, and I was thankful indeed that I went, though every word I said in the presence of her terrible grief, sounded flat and cold and dead.  How little the tenderest love and sympathy can do, in such sorrows!  She was so bewildered and appalled by her sudden bereavement, that it was almost a mockery to say a word; and yet I kept saying what I know is true, that Christ in the soul is better than any earthly joy.  Both Mr. Prentiss and myself feel the reaction which must inevitably follow such a strain.

You ask if I look over the past on my birthdays.  I suppose I used to do it and feel dreadfully at the pitiful review, but since I have had the children’s to celebrate, I haven’t thought much of mine.  But this time, being fifty years old, did set me upon thinking, and I had so many mercies to recount and to thank God for, that I hardly felt pangs of any sort.  I suppose He controls our moods in such seasons, and I have done trying to force myself into this or that train of thought.  I am sure that a good deal of what used to seem like repentance and sorrow for sin on such occasions, was really nothing but wounded pride that wished it could appear better in its own eyes.  God has been so good to me!  I wish I could begin to realise how good!  I think a great many thoughts to you that I can’t put on paper.  Life seems teaching some new, or deepening the impression of some old, lesson, all the time.