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LETTER XI.

YOUNG, gifted, and beloved-yet unhappy! Blessed with health, leisure, and competence -yet habitually sad! Wholly your own mistress, and a Christian by more than profession--yet subject to ennui! Indeed, my dearest this is a sad state of things, though, independent of your own confession, I know it to be one fully possible, and, with characters like your own, very common. Minds of a reflective, and somewhat timid cast, are most liable to the influence of morbid sensibility; they soon begin to look through, rather than upon society, and consequently become disgusted with its

construction. They serve their pleasures as children do their toys-pull them to pieces in order to ascertain their internal mechanism; and their emotions, as the same children serve rose-buds open them to accelerate their time of bloom. Without intentional want of benevolence, they feel little towards their fellow-creatures beyond a general goodwill, or perfect indifference, whilst their few affections are ardent, arbitrary, and exclusive.

To bring the subject back to a personal point, by quoting an expression of your own,

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they live in a little world of their own creation;" which little world, by the way, seldom contains many inhabitants. There is generally much that is interesting in a mind thus habituated; and when religious principle gets firm and influential hold of its energies, the excellence which results, is perhaps of a higher kind, than can be engrafted on a weaker, gayer character. This admission is not meant, however, to reconcile you to a state of feeling at once unnatural and indefensible: the world might as well be one

universal church-yard, as a world of fasti dious, exclusive, sensitive beings, who hold their spirits as the streamer does its direction, at the will of every fluttering breeze. But as you have applied to me for counsel, I wish, like a prudent physician, to gain your confidence in the outset; to prove that I understand your case, before I bid you follow my prescriptions. From me too you are assured of affectionate sympathy, not merely because I love you, but because I myself lived many years under a melancholy star, and therefore know, from personal experience, its pains, its pleasures, and its penalties. I know, too, something of a happier state, and, with care and attention, (you must allow me to keep up the physician's phrase,) so, I doubt not, will you. In one sense you are sensible of the numberless and solid comforts you enjoy; but in another, you are blind to them : never having known their loss, you esteem them matters of course, and they do not produce excitement. On the other hand, you have some drawbacks, a few annoyances; and to these you are not so torpid as you are

to the blessings; these excite positive irritation and weariness, and by proving to you that life does not lie in fairy land, make you sometimes wish there were no life at all. Day after day creeps on, divided between irksome submission to ordinary, and therefore disagreeable duties, vain dreams of a fancied existence fraught with interest and free from alloy, whilst those pleasures really in accordance with your own tastes fail to satisfy, because you expect too much from them. In the Edens of your own making you cease to be "emparadised." Ah! my love, whence is all this? One short and simple answer will suffice, even that which accounts for all human error, and human unhappiness-you have forgotten the true end of life; silently, and unconsciously, you have disconnected it from eternity, and therefore its beauty has no bloom, its disquietudes no balm.

Much has been said, and strikingly said, of the painful contrast between romance and reality; but simile, instance, and allegory, are all in vain, unless the Spirit of Truth ac

company both writer and reader. May that spirit, dearest though now it seems an eclipsed sun, again shine "into your heart, and make its wilderness rejoice and blossom as the rose." When I think of your real circumstances, I wish it were the extravagant hyperbole it appears, to apply such a phrase to one so young, and, as regards real trials, so sheltered. Yet do not suppose I wish to deceive you into gay and thoughtless views; I could paint you a much more melancholy picture of life than you could possibly do for yourself. The only Being who ever promised peace, prefaced that promise with a decided intimation of the world's unutterable vanity.

To speak honestly, I do not think you will ever find a smoother path than the one which you are now treading. You may certainly have some enjoyments added, but then others will as certainly be subtracted. With more liberty you may have less health, or additional cares with an increase of society consonant to your feelings, your keen żest for it may proportionately diminish:

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