3 1 6 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. TIL 



spending the day in brooding meditation. But now and then 

 old gleams come out, and from conversation with him I find 

 that the consolations of the gospel are not failing him in his 

 time of trial. I am sure, indeed, that he enjoys as perfect peace 

 as one of his temperament, suffering from his ailment, can do. 

 Pray for us all, my dear friend. What would I not give for you 

 beside us ? ... I shall write very soon. At present I am 

 harassed exceedingly, and can send only this incoherent 

 scrawl." 



On the 20th of the same month he gives further proof that 

 James's time on earth will be short, and adds, " For all this I 

 would have prepared you by an earlier letter, but all my spare 

 time, the very little that remains after my weary, sickening, 

 laboratory work, has been spent for you in another way. I have 

 been copying the essay [by James] on Pantheism, the Trinity, etc., 

 for you. It is addressed to you, and you may consider it his last 

 legacy. . . . Indeed, I have been so occupied for the last three 

 months, that except on the blessed Sabbath, I have known 

 no intermission, chasing a Will-o'-the-Wisp is an intermin- 

 able 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 for- 

 mer 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 mocking creed. We have rejoiced together, with affection- 

 ate 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 



