The general cause is, that you are naturally of a nervous temperament; and this I say from what I have seen of you personally, and what you have told me concerning your mother at various times, and concerning your brother William at the time his wife died.  The first special cause is your exposure to bad weather on your journey, which my experience clearly proves to be very severe on defective nerves.  The second is the absence of all business and conversation of friends, which might divert your mind, give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the bitterness of death.  The third is the rapid and near approach of that crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings concentrate.

If from all these causes you shall escape and go through triumphantly, without another “twinge of the soul,” I shall be most happily but most egregiously deceived.  If, on the contrary, you shall, as I expect you will at sometime, be agonized and distressed, let me, who have some reason to speak with judgment on such a subject, beseech you to ascribe it to the causes I have mentioned, and not to some false and ruinous suggestion of the Devil.

“But,” you will say, “do not your causes apply to every one engaged in a like undertaking?” By no means.  The particular causes, to a greater or less extent, perhaps do apply in all cases; but the general one,—­nervous debility, which is the key and conductor of all the particular ones, and without which they would be utterly harmless,—­though it does pertain to you, does not pertain to one in a thousand.  It is out of this that the painful difference between you and the mass of the world springs.

I know what the painful point with you is at all times when you are unhappy; it is an apprehension that you do not love her as you should.  What nonsense!  How came you to court her?  Was it because you thought she deserved it, and that you had given her reason to expect it?  If it was for that why did not the same reason make you court Ann Todd, and at least twenty others of whom you can think, and to whom it would apply with greater force than to her?  Did you court her for her wealth?  Why, you know she had none.  But you say you reasoned yourself into it.  What do you mean by that?  Was it not that you found yourself unable to reason yourself out of it?  Did you not think, and partly form the purpose, of courting her the first time you ever saw her or heard of her?  What had reason to do with it at that early stage?  There was nothing at that time for reason to work upon.  Whether she was moral, amiable, sensible, or even of good character, you did not, nor could then know, except, perhaps, you might infer the last from the company you found her in.

All you then did or could know of her was her personal appearance and deportment; and these, if they impress at all, impress the heart, and not the head.