"But alas! I can place no dependence on the continuance of my feelings beyond the moment that excites them. My life is a mere vision; the world in which I act has no connection with that in which I think. My pleasure, my happiness, is so far independent of the objects around me, that I can hardly associate them together. Having little else to do than meditate, I exist almost in imagination, and communicate so little with others on the subject of my thoughts, that it seems like living two beings; the greater part of my time is passed in this ideal world, and I am consequently unfitted to mix in the real one in which I am placed. This is a misfortune and a fault. Which has the greatest share of blame? It is most unfavorable to true Christian humility; for, as Mr. Channing says of the effects of a diseased imagination, 'We feel superiority to the world in ascending the airy height, and pride ourselves in this refinement of the mind. After arraying ourselves in the robes of glory, we cannot take the lowly seat which Christianity assigns us.' Thus, then, although this elevation above the objects of this vain world may be a right spirit when it rises from the pure flow of real piety, if it be only the enthusiasm of the moment, which rises for a time and then vanishes away, an abstract theory which would not be practised upon in the hour of temptation, it had better never have been. When we have once been imposed on, we know not what to trust. All my purposes of goodness and high resolves are as yet but theories, which I fear I should never put in practice should temptation assail me. O, I dare not be thus happy!
The first change consequent upon the death of old Mrs. Lovell, was the leaving of the house in Pearl Street. This, to Mary, was not a small matter. It was not the mere moving of furniture, nor the living in one street rather than another, of the same town. It was the loss of the earliest and only HOME that she had ever known; and none are to be envied who cannot enter into the feelings which such an event must awaken in a heart like hers. With little of the romantic in her nature, and as great independence of the merely local and external as is often seen, her love of family and early friends, her memory of childhood and all its associations, the very changes and sufferings which had made so large a part of her life, were all identified with "that house" as the place of their birth, and bound her to it by the strongest chords. Within a month of the day of her grandmother's death, she wrote her last letter there, which, with the first that was written out of the house, will show what she felt, and why.