I miss you dreadfully, my dear H——­, and I do wish you could come back to us when Dorothy has left you; but I know that cannot be, and so I look forward to the summer time, the sunny time, the rosy time, when I shall be with you again at Ardgillan.

Yesterday, I read for the first time Joanna Baillie’s “Count Basil.”  I am not sure that the love she describes does not affect me more even than Shakespeare’s delineation of the passion in “Romeo and Juliet.”  There is a nerveless despondency about it that seems to me more intolerable than all the vivid palpitating anguish of the tragedy of Verona; it is like dying of slow poison, or malarial fever, compared with being shot or stabbed or even bleeding to death, which is life pouring out from one, instead of drying up in one’s brains.  I think the lines beginning—­

        “I have seen the last look of her heavenly eyes,”

some of the most poignantly pathetic I know.  I afterward read over again Mr. Procter’s play; it is extremely well written, but I am afraid it would not act as well as it reads.  I believe I told you that “Inez de Castro” was finally given up.

Sally and Lizzy Siddons came and sat with me for some time; they seem well and cheerful.  Their mother, they said, was not very well; how should she be! though, indeed, regret would be selfish.  Her son is gone to fulfill his own wishes in pursuing the career for which he was most fit; he will find in his uncle George Siddons’s house in Calcutta almost a second home.  Sally, whom you know I respect almost as much as love, said it was surprising how soon they had learned to accept and become reconciled to their brother’s departure.  Besides all our self-invoked aids of reason and religion, nature’s own provision for the need of our sorrows is more bountiful and beneficent than we always perceive or acknowledge.  No one can go on living upon agony; we cannot grieve for ever if we would, and our most strenuous efforts of self-control derive help from the inevitable law of change, against which we sometimes murmur and struggle as if it wronged our consistency in sorrow and constancy in love.  The tendency to heal is as universal as the liability to smart.  You always speak of change with a sort of vague horror that surprises me.  Though all things round us are for ever shifting and altering, and though we ourselves vary and change, there is a supreme spirit of steadfastness in the midst of this huge unrest, and an abiding, unshaken, immovable principle of good guiding this vanishing world of fluctuating atoms, in whose eternal permanence of nature we largely participate, and our tendency toward and aspiration for whose perfect stability is one of the very causes of the progress, and therefore mutability, of our existence.  Perhaps the most painful of all the forms in which change confronts us is in the increased infirmities and diminished graces