486 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



' Denmark Hill, April 9th, 1857. 



' MY DEAR MADAM, 



' I received yesterday evening the book which 

 I owe to the kindness of your late husband, and which 

 I receive as from his hand ; with mingled feelings, not 

 altogether to be set down in a letter, even if I could 

 tell you them without giving some new power of hurt, 

 if that be possible, to your own sorrow. But there are 

 one or two things which I want to say to you. Hu- 

 manly speaking, I cannot imagine a greater grief than 

 yours, or one which a stranger should more reverently 

 or more hopelessly leave unspoken of, attempting no 

 word of consolation ; and yet I can fancy that there is 

 one point in which you may not yet have enough 

 regarded it. To all of us, who knew your late hus- 

 band's genius at all, to you, above all, who knew it 

 best, it seems to me that the bitterest cruelty of the 

 trial must lie in the sense of his work being so unac- 

 complished, of all that he might have done, had he 

 lived ; and of the littleness of the thing that brought 

 about his illness and death. It seems so hard that a 

 little overwork, a few more commas to be put into a 

 page of type, a paragraph to be shortened or added, in 

 the last moment, should make the difference between 

 life and death. Perhaps your friends have dwelt too 

 much if they have attempted to help you at all on 

 ordinary beaten topics of religious consolation, not, it 

 seems to me, applying to the worst part of this sorrow, 

 and they may not have dwelt enough on what does 

 fully bear upon it, namely, the general law of Pro- 

 vidence in God's " strange work." We rarely see how 

 small the things are which bring about what He has 

 appointed, nor do we see, generally, the strange loss, 

 which takes place continually, of the powers He gives. 



