Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/119

 THE RAiYDALL FAMILY III

like well that we could have heard together the great concert of three thousand performers that many years ago celebrated in London the birthday of Haydn, of which Bombet gives an account.

It is my wish that you should take care of your health, a thing easily lost and with difficulty regained. I hear that you have a bad cough, and think that cold affusions applied frequently to the throat would make you less sen- sitive in this respect.

I see your father now and then, and I do not remember to have seen him so well at any time as he now appears. I have no doubt that a diminution of care has been highly useful to him. Our conversations are not without inter- est, as we equally enjoy the sense of an accurate concep- tion both of our ideas and impressions.

I find myself drawn more and more to books this winter, which afford me employment so quiet that the days seem to succeed one another without events, and with an ever increasing rapidity. From time to time I look forward, at I know not what distance, to that preci- pice at the end of life's journey which to the majority of men seems so terrible, but which, when it is reached, is seldom regarded with terror. For Nature at that time is apt kindly to throw a veil over our senses, and in a general dissolution of the vital force to diminish the keen- ness of all impressions. I scarcely know whether the con- quest of hope or a submission to its delusions affords man the most pleasure ; but I have never found in myself the faculty of realizing to my belief anything which was not demonstrated to my understanding. This gives me a less vivid notion of the geographical peculiarities of the unseen world than is enjoyed by many. But it perhaps increases my disposition to a reverential confidence in that all-

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