4 DEATH OF JAMES RUSSELL. 169 



I have been so occupied for the last three months, that 

 except on the blessed Sabbath, I have known no intermis- 

 sion, chasing a Will-o'-the-Wisp is an interminable thing, 

 and you will, I hope, forgive my apparent neglect of you. 



" James has lately read, with more interest than he has 

 felt in anything else, a very remarkable work, called ' Life in 

 the Sick-Room, or Essays by an Invalid/ understood, on 

 very good, if not quite certain, grounds, to be the work of 

 Miss Martineau. That lady has been for some years a 

 sufferer, and has now, from her solitude, given to the world 

 her scheme of consolation in trial. The work conveys a far 

 higher idea of Miss Martineau's power and nobleness of 

 intellect and feeling than any of her former works have done. 

 My cousin and I have read it together with great interest 

 and admiration, coupled with the deepest melancholy at the 

 thought that any poor soul should expect to find abiding 

 consolations in the hollow transcendentalisms of her mock- 

 ing creed. We have rejoiced together, with affectionate 

 sympathy for the writer, that we know an unfailing, inex- 

 haustible source of sympathy as worthy of being applied to, 

 and far more sure and unfailing than, anything the proud 

 human heart can extract from speculations on the essential 

 abidingness of good, as contrasted with the transitoriness of 

 evil, &c. &c. I am becoming absurdly diffuse on this topic, 

 but I will have done. Two of my sisters have been laid up 

 this winter ; they are both in bed while I write. This 

 makes a sad household, and drives one to dwell on sources 

 of consolation." 



Exactly three weeks after this did the end come, and the 

 next letter gives the sad news to Dr. Cairns : " When I 

 wrote to you last, I looked for many weeks, at least, as yet 

 remaining. On the day of his death, however, we had all, 



