. . . It is now a fortnight or more since the overwhelming news came to us of the death of Channing. During this time my mind has been passing through steps of gradual approximation to the reality, but never did it [174] find, or else voluntarily interpose, so many barriers between itself and reality as in this most deplorable event. There are losses which I should more acutely feel than the loss of Channing; because friendship with him lacked, I imagine, in all who enjoyed it, those little familiarities, those fonder leanings, which leave us, as it were, bewildered and utterly prostrate when the beloved object is gone. But there is here a sense of general and irreparable loss, such as the people of a realm might be supposed to feel when its cherished head is suddenly taken away. For I suppose that no person sustained so many and such vital relations to the whole republic of thought, to the whole realm of moral feeling among us, as this, our venerated teacher and friend. To call him "that great and good man," does not meet the feeling we have about him. Familiar to almost nobody, he was near to everybody. His very personality seems to have been half lost in the sense of general benefit. He was one of those great gifts of God, like sunlight or the beauty of nature, which we scarcely know how to live without, or in the loss of which, at least, life is sadly changed, and the world itself is mournfully bereft. But a letter affords no scope for such a theme; and besides, painful as it is to pass to common topics, they claim their dues. Life, ay, common life, must go on as it ever did, and nothing shall tear that infinite web of mystery in which it walks enveloped. Ours, however, in these days, is rather a shaded life. Absence from home, a strange land, a land, too, that sits in mourning over the great relics of the past,--all this tends to make it so. More material still is what passes within the microcosm, and I am not yet well. Not that I am worse, for I am continually better. But--but, in short, not to [175] speak too gravely, if a man feels as if one of the snakes of Medusa's head were certainly in his brain,--I have seen a horrible picture of the Medusa to-day by Leonardo da Vinci,--he cannot be very happy, you know. And if those around him be of such as "bear one another's burdens," then you see how the general conscience follows.