Miss Berry. 207 



FROM MISS BERRY TO MRS. SOMERVILLE. 



BELLEVUE, 18& September, 1834. 



MY DEAE MRS. SOMERVILLE, 



I have just finished reading your book, which has 

 entertained rne extremely, and at the same time, I hope, 

 improved my moral character in the Christian virtue of 

 humility. These must appear to you such odd results 

 so little like those produced on the great majority of 

 your readers, that you must allow me to explain them to 

 you. Humbled, I must be, by finding my own intellect 

 unequal to following, beyond a first step, the explanations 

 by which you seek to make easy to comprehension the 

 marvellous phenomena of the universe humbled, by 

 feeling the intellectual difference between you and me, 

 placing you as much above me in the scale of reasoning 

 beings, as I am above my dog. Still I ^ rejoice with 

 humility at feeling myself, in that order of understand- 

 ings which, although utterly incapable of following the 

 chain of your reasonings, calculations, and inductions 

 utterly deprived of the powers necessary sic itur ad 

 astra am yet informed, enlightened, and entertained with 

 the series of sublime truths to which you conduct me. 



In some foggy morning of November, I shall drive out 

 to you at Chelsea and surprise you with my ignorance 

 of science, by asking you to explain to me some things 

 which you will wonder any one can have so long existed 

 without knowing. In the mean time, I wish you could 

 read in any combination of the stars the probability of 

 our often having such a season as this, of uninterrupted 

 summer since April last, and when last week it was 

 sobering into autumn, has now returned to enter 



