I, like my dear mamma, am impelled to endeavour to return thanks for benefits, at the recollection of which the heart sinks, and all thanks become inadequate and vain. Yet suffer a sister's thanks for a brother spared, pardoned, and restored to life! Restored at the hazard of your own, and after a mortal affront received! Restored by the energies of fortitude, sagacity, and affection! Indeed, sir, I cannot tell you what I feel. It is utterly impossible. Imagine me your friend, your sister. Command my life, it is yours. Yours not so much because the youth you have saved happened to be my brother, as for the true esteem I have for qualities so exalted. This is not the first time you have excited my admiration, and permit me to add my love. Your heart is too noble to misunderstand me. I love virtue, in man or woman; and if that be sin may I be ever sinful! I would wish you the joys of heaven, but my wishes are vain; you have them already: nor can a mind like yours be robbed of them, by all the powers of man or accident. L. Clifton LETTER XLVIII _Louisa Clifton to Anna Wenbourne St. Ives_ _Rose-Bank_ Your three last letters, my dear Anna, have affected me in a very uncommon manner. The pure passion, the noble resignation, and the fortitude of Frank Henley are unparalleled. Not to admire, not to esteem, not to love such virtues is impossible. His unshaken patience, his generosity, his forgiveness, his courage, his perseverance, are inimitable proofs of his superiority. Who can forbear wishing him success? Ought he not to command it; to say it is mine; truth and justice dare not deny it to me? Indeed, Anna, my mind is strangely in doubt. To be guilty of injustice to such worth is surely no common guilt. And yet my brother--Headlong lunatic! Whose intemperance is every moment hurrying him into extremes.--I grant, my friend, his mind is worthy of being retrieved; and it is a generous, a noble enterprize. Nay I own I sometimes persuade myself it cannot fail, when Anna St. Ives and Frank Henley, from motives so pure and with so much determination, engage in the cause. But at others, I see peril at every step! I find my heart reproaching me for not adjuring my mend to desist; for not exciting her to bestow her hand on the man who of all others can most justly claim it, as his right. That I desire to see my brother all that emulation and wisdom could make him, the friend and husband of my Anna, the rival of her virtues, and the bosom intimate of him whom she is willing to forego for this brother's sake; that I desire this, ardently, vehemently, is most true. If the end be attainable, it is a noble enterprize. But the difficulties! What are they? Have they been well examined?--I, with my Anna, say mind can do all things with mind: truth is irresistible, and must finally conquer. But it has many modes of conquering, and some of them are tragical, and dreadful.