I thank you with all my heart for the gift of your book,[41] and yet more for the kindly inscription, which affected me much.

[Footnote 41:  The Book of Job, translated from the Hebrew Text by John, Bishop of Fredericton.]

As one gets older one feels distance—­or whatever parts one from people one cares for—­worse and worse, I think!—­However, whatever helps to remedy the separation is all the dearer!

I had devoured enough of your notes, to have laughed more than once and almost to have heard you speak, before I moved from the chair in which the book found me, and had read all the Introduction.  I could HEAR you say that “Bildad uttered a few trusims in a pompous tone”!

What I have read of your version seems to me grand, bits here and there I certainly had never felt the poetical power of before.  Rex will be delighted with it!

I fully receive all you say about Satan and the Sons of God.  But I think a certain painfulness about such portions of Holy Writ—­does not come from (1) Unwillingness to lay one’s hand upon one’s mouth and be silent before God. (2) Or difficulty about the Personality of Satan.  I fancy it is because in spite of oneself it is painful that one of the rare liftings of the Great Veil between us and the “ways” of the Majesty of God should disclose a scene of such petty features—­a sort of wrangling and experimentalizing, that it would be pleasanter to be able to believe was a parable brought home to our vulgar understandings rather than a real vision of the Lord our Strength.

I am, my dear Lord,
Your grateful and ever affectionate old friend,
J.H.E.

TO J.H.E.

Fredericton. April 8, 1880.

MY DEAR MRS. EWING,

I will not let the mail go out without proving that I am not a bad correspondent, and without thanking you for your delightful letter.  Oh! why don’t you squeeze yourself sometimes into that funny little house opposite Miss Bailey’s, and let me take a cup of tea off the cushions, or some other place where the books would allow it to be put?  And why don’t you allow me to stumble over my German?  And why doesn’t Rex, Esq. (for Rex is too familiar even for a Bishop) correct my musical efforts?  How terrible this word past is!  The past is at all events real, but the future is so shadowy, and like the ghosts of Ulysses it entirely eludes one’s grasp.  I speak of course of things that belong to this life.  It was (I assure you) a treat to lay hold of you and your letters, and (a minor consideration) to find that even your handwriting had not degenerated, and had not become like spiders’ legs dipped in ink and crawling on the paper, as is the case of some nameless correspondents.  There was only one word I could not make out.  In personal appearance the letters stood thus, [Greek:  us].  It looks like “us,” or like the Greek [Greek:  un], which being interpreted is “pig.”  But M——­, who is far cleverer than I am, at once oracularly pronounced it “very,” and I believe her and you too....