As for drawing, that I have once or twice tried to accomplish, but the circumstances of my unsettled and restless life have been unfavorable for any steady effort to follow it up, and I have got no further yet than a passionate desire to know how to draw.  If (as I sometimes imagine) in a future existence undeveloped capacities and persistent yearnings for all kinds of good may find expansion and exercise, and not only our moral but also our intellectual being put forth new powers and achieve progress in new directions, then in some of the successive heavens to which, perhaps, I may be allowed to climb (if to any) I shall be a painter of pictures; a mere idea that suggests a heavenly state of long-desired capacity, to possess which, here on earth, I would give at once the finger of either hand least indispensable to an artist.  Of the two pursuits, a painter’s or a musician’s, considered not as arts but as accomplishments merely, the former appears to me infinitely more desirable, for a woman, than the latter far more frequently cultivated one.  The one is a sedative, the other an acute stimulant to the nervous system.  The one is a perfectly independent and always to be commanded occupation; the other imperatively demands an instrument, utters an audible challenge to attention, and must either command solitude or disturb any society not inclined to become an audience.  The one cultivates habits of careful, accurate observation of nature, and requires patient and precise labor in reproducing her models; the other appeals powerfully to the imagination and emotions, and charms almost in proportion as it excites its votaries.  With regard to natural aptitude, the most musical of nations—­the German—­shows by the impartial training of its common schools how universal it considers a certain degree of musical capacity.

Our musical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the glees, madrigals, rounds, and catches, requiring considerable skill, and familiarly performed formerly in the country houses and home circles of our gentry, and the noble church music of our cathedral choirs, bear witness to a high musical inspiration, and thorough musical training in their composers and executants.

We seem to have lost this vein of original national music; the Lancashire weavers and spinners are still good choristers, but among the German half of our common Teutonic race, the real feeling for and knowledge of music continues to flourish, while with the Anglo-Saxons of Britain and America it has dwindled and decayed.

                               GREAT RUSSELL STREET, November 8, 1830. 
     DEAREST H——­,

I received your note, for I cannot honor the contents of your last
with the name of a letter (whatever title the shape and quantity of
the paper it was written on may claim).