“When I find time I mean to write to your cousin.... I am sorry for W., he is a very nice boy. But, dear me, they do seem such a pair of children.
I don’t think she will get a _nicer_ man, but of course that is nothing if she doesn’t love him. I quite agree with you, ‘Never marry if you can help it’!”
And, in the depths of her mind she was constantly pondering the problems and mysteries of our being.
“Jan. 21st. [Diary] 29!—‘et praeterea nihil’!”
“Jan. 25th.... Yesterday Martineau’s fine definition of atheism,—the mind that venerates nothing, aspires to nothing.”
“Jan. 31st. Came tonight across old Trench’s line,—‘When God afflicts thee think He hews a rugged stone, which must be shaped or else aside as useless thrown.’
And then those true sad pale lines of Martineau’s (‘Child’s Thought’) about youth’s eagerness for truth, sometimes productive of dark agonies of doubt and loneliness drearier than death,—leaving the soul exposed upon the field of conflict without a God to strive for or a weapon for the fight.
Yesterday his ‘Immortality’ helped me again to seize that idea,— apprehend, ‘hang on to’ (Trench). That the negative testimony was stronger for than against—far harder to realize soul extinct than immortal,—that instinct for immortality grows stronger in sorrow, bereavements and on confines of death,—more likely teachers than the dust and glare of Vanity Fair. That the strange ‘caprice of death’ in selection, etc., inexplicable except in belief of future to which this is the ante-chamber. ‘Simply migrations of mind.’”
Of course the outward stagnation of life, the want of a definite object and purpose, renewed the old regrets for the friendship by means of which “we might have done anything together, we two.”
‘Are not the letters coming? The sun has almost set.’
I seem to have two such abiding ideas (presentiments?—hopes?) 1st. That somehow, somewhen the old door must be reopened,—light in the eventide,... 2nd. That some medical way will open—perhaps in Scotland,—and at length some one take pity on me and really teach me and push me.
Oh, dear, how I wish I had anyone with whom I could really take counsel and make common cause.
Well, I believe I am learning silence and patience at least somewhat, but how ‘bleak and bare’! Everything so grey and so dim.