requires a thorough and imbuing knowledge of the Hebrew manners and spirit, with a chastened energy of imagination, which I am as yet far from possessing.  But if I should be permitted peace and time to follow out my ideas, I have hopes.  Perhaps it is a weakness to confide to you embryo designs, which never may glow into life, or mock me by their failure.’

* * * * *

’I have long had a suspicion that no mind can systematize its knowledge, and carry on the concentrating processes, without some fixed opinion on the subject of metaphysics.  But that indisposition, or even dread of the study, which you may remember, has kept me from meddling with it, till lately, in meditating on the life of Goethe, I thought I must get some idea of the history of philosophical opinion in Germany, that I might be able to judge of the influence it exercised upon his mind.  I think I can comprehend him every other way, and probably interpret him satisfactorily to others,—­if I can get the proper materials.  When I was in Cambridge, I got Fichte and Jacobi; I was much interrupted, but some time and earnest thought I devoted.  Fichte I could not understand at all; though the treatise which I read was one intended to be popular, and which he says must compel (bezwingen) to conviction.  Jacobi I could understand in details, but not in system.  It seemed to me that his mind must have been moulded by some other mind, with which I ought to be acquainted, in order to know him well,—­perhaps Spinoza’s.  Since I came home, I have been consulting Buhle’s and Tennemann’s histories of philosophy, and dipping into Brown, Stewart, and that class of books.’

* * * * *

’After I had cast the burden of my cares upon you, I rested, and read Petrarch for a day or two.  But that could not last.  I had begun to “take an account of stock,” as Coleridge calls it, and was forced to proceed.  He says few persons ever did this faithfully, without being dissatisfied with the result, and lowering their estimate of their supposed riches.  With me it has ended in the most humiliating sense of poverty; and only just enough pride is left to keep your poor friend off the parish.  As it is, I have already asked items of several besides yourself; but, though they have all given what they had, it has by no means answered my purpose; and I have laid their gifts aside, with my other hoards, which gleamed so fairy bright, and are now, in the hour of trial, turned into mere slate-stones.  I am not sure that even if I do find the philosopher’s stone, I shall be able to transmute them into the gold they looked so like formerly.  It will be long before I can give a distinct, and at the same time concise, account of my present state.  I believe it is a great era.  I am thinking now,—­really thinking, I believe; certainly it seems as if I had never done so before.  If it does not kill me, something will come of