To a young Friend, April 21, 1870.

I was right sorry to lose your Saturday’s call.  It was a happy day to me, but I can conceive of no enjoyment of any sort that would put me out of sympathy with the trials of friends: 

  “Old and young are bringing troubles,
    Great and small, for me to hear;
  I have often blessed by sorrows
    That drew other’s grief so near."

I thought I was saying a very ordinary thing when I spoke of thanking God for His long years of discipline, but very likely life did not look to me at your age as it does now.  I was rather startled the other day, to find it written in German, in my own hand, “I can not say the will is there,” referring to a hymn which says, “Der Will ist da, die Kraft ist klein, Doch wird dir nicht zuwider seyn.”  I suppose there was some great struggle going on when this foolish heart said that, just as if God did not invariably do for us the very best that can be done. [5] You speak of having your love to Jesus intensified by interviews with me.  It can hardly be otherwise, when those meet together who love Him, and it is a rule that works both ways; acts and reacts.  I should be thankful if no human being could ever meet me, even in a chance way, and not go away clasping Him the closer, and if I could meet no one who did not so stir and move me.  It is my constant prayer.  I have such insatiable longings to know and love Him better that I go about hungering and thirsting for the fellowship of those who feel so too; when I meet them I call them my “benedictions.”  Next best to being with Christ Himself, I love to be with those who have His spirit and are yearning for more of His likeness.  You speak of putting “deep and dark chasms between” yourself and Christ.  He lets us do this that we may learn our nothingness, our weakness, and turn, disgusted, from ourselves to Him.  May I venture to assure you that the “chasms” occur less and less frequently as one presses on, till finally they turn into “mountains of light.”  Get and keep a will for God, and everything that will is ready for will come.  This is about a tenth part of what I might say.

To Miss E. A. Warner, New York, April 25, 1870.

I wish I could describe to you my last interview with Mrs. B. She had altered so in two weeks in which I had not seen her, that I should not have known her.  She spoke with difficulty, but by getting close to her mouth I could hear all she said.  She went back to the first time she met me, told me her heart then knitted itself to mine, and how she had loved me ever since, etc., etc.  I then asked her if she had any parting counsel to give me:  “No, not a word."....  Some one came in and wet her lips, gave her a sprig of citronatis, and passed out.  I crushed it and let her smell the bruised leaves, saying, “You are just like these crushed leaves.”  She smiled, and replied, “Well, I haven’t had one pain too many,