02 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



ine much pleasure, therefore I hope you will not leave off that light 

 and happy strain which pervaded them. 



" I know that you and I are sworn friends, and that you are in- 

 terested in every thing that concerns me. Nothing, therefore, in 

 your behavior towards me, will ever appear unfeeling ; and what 

 you are afraid I might have mistaken for indifference, I know to be 

 the hallowed voice of friendship. Were you here, I would have an 

 opportunity of pouring out my whole sovd to you, and in that I 

 would find much relief. 



" But a letter is such a short thing, and to me, sorrow is when 

 written so unintelligible, that in cases of absence I am convinced it 

 is best to say little upon such mournful topics. 



" If writing to you, and hearing from you, can divert my atten- 

 tion from my own mind, much is accomplished ; and I assure you 

 that your letters, with the minute superscription, effected this 

 end. Before I go further, your resolution to be sorrowful be- 

 cause I might be happier is very injudicious, upon this principle, 

 that while it hurts yourself, so likewise does it him whom you 

 mean to benefit." 



To divert his thoughts, he went off in these autumnal days on 

 one of those long solitary rambles which often landed him unpre- 

 meditatedly at night in an unknown region, some fifty miles from 

 his starting-point. A glimpse of one of these excursions is afforded 

 in the next letter, the greater portion of which, however, is occu- 

 ])ied with an outpouring of his woes. These seem to have received 

 fresh stimulus from an ungrounded alarm that a rival had come be- 

 tween him and the dear object of his anxieties. 



" I have been expecting to hear from you for some time past ; 

 that is to say, I would not have been greatly astonished though I had 

 heard from you, neither am I in the least surprised that you have not 

 written. As I feel, however, what Wordsworth and other gentle- 

 men of his stamp would think proper to call 'impulse to write 'mid 

 deepest solitude,' I have disregarded entirely the great advance 

 upon the price of writing materials, and will add to the revenue of 

 the Post-Oflice by the postage of one letter, which you will never 

 grudge to pay, when you have discovered the hidden soul whiek 

 pervades these effusions. I have lately returned from a walk ovei 

 a pretty wide extent of country, during which, if at particular times 

 blistered soles and stiff joints did not vastly increase the pleasures 



