"By attempt to return I mean an attempt to return to my old life, for so I have to call it--that is, to get clear of this influence. And yet I have no will to will against it. I do not desire it, or its mode of living, and I am opposed to its tendency.
"What bearing this has upon the question of my coming home you will perceive. As soon as I can come, I will. If I should do so now, it would throw me back to the place from which I started. Is this fancy on my part? All I can say is that if so the last nine or ten months of my life have been a fancy which is too deep for me to control."
After paying his family a visit in April, he writes to them on his return:
"Brook Farm, April 14, 1843.--Here I am alone in my room once more. I feel settled, and begin to live again, separated from everything but my studies and thoughts, and the feeling of gratitude toward you all for treating me so much better than I am aware of ever having treated you. May I ever keep this sense of obligation and indebtedness. My prayer is, that the life I have been led to live these few months back may prove to the advantage of us all in the end. I sometimes feel guilty because I did not attempt again to try and labor with you. But the power that kept me back, its hold upon me, its strength over me, all that I am unable to communicate, makes my situation appear strange to others, and to myself irreconcilable with my former state. Still, I trust that, in a short period, all things will take their peaceful and orderly course."
TO GEORGE HECKER.--"Brook Farm, May 12, 1843.--How much nearer to you I feel on account of your good letter you cannot estimate--nearer than when we slept in the same bed. Nearness of body is no evidence of the distance between souls, for I imagine Christ loved His mother very tenderly when He said, 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?'"
"I have felt, time and again, that either I would have to give up the life that was struggling in me, or withdraw from business in the way that we pursue it. This I had long felt, before the period came which suddenly threw me involuntarily out of it. Here I am, living in the present, without a why or a wherefore, trusting that something will shape my course intelligibly. I am completely without object. And when occasionally I emerge, if I may so speak, into actual life, I feel that I have dissipated time. A sense of guilt accompanies that of pleasure, and I return inwardly into a deeper, intenser life, breaking those tender roots which held me fast for a short period to the outward. In study only do I enter with wholeness; nothing else appears to take hold of my life." . . . "I am staying here, intentionally, for a short period. When the time arrives" (for leaving) "heaven knows what I may do. I am now perfectly dumb before it. Perhaps I may return and enter into business with more perseverance and industry than before; perhaps I may stay here; it may be that I shall be led elsewhere. But there is no utility in speculating on the future. If we lived as we should, we would feel that we lived in the presence of God, without past or future, having a full consciousness of existence, living the 'eternal life.' . . .