that has always equal parts,--a drop of sweet to a drop
of bitter. But I shall never be callous, never unable to
understand _home-sickness_. Am not I, too, one of the band who
know not where to lay their heads? Am I wise enough to hear
such things? Perhaps not; but happy enough, surely. For that
Power which daily makes me understand the value of the little
wheat amid the field of tares, and shows me how the kingdom of
heaven is sown in the earth like a grain of mustard-seed, is
good to me, and bids me call unhappiness happy.'

* * * * *

TO ----

'_March_, 1842.--My inward life has been more rich and deep,
and of more calm and musical flow than ever before. It seems
to me that Heaven, whose course has ever been to cross-bias
me, as Herbert said, is no niggard in its compensations. I
have indeed been forced to take up old burdens, from which I
thought I had learned what they could teach; the pen has been
snatched from my hand just as I most longed to use it; I have
been forced to dissipate, when I most wished to concentrate;
to feel the hourly presence of others' mental wants, when, it
seemed, I was just on the point of satisfying my own. But a
new page is turned, and an era begun, from which I am not yet
sufficiently remote to describe it as I would. I have lived a
life, if only in the music I have heard, and one development
seemed to follow another therein, as if bound together by
destiny, and all things were done for me. All minds, all
scenes, have ministered to me. Nature has seemed an