and secondly, impressions of grief or joy, according, and in proportion to, the information I receive, or the inferences that I draw, respecting your health, ease of heart and mind, and all the events, incidents, and circumstances, that affect, or are calculated to affect, both or either. Only this in addition--whatever _else_ may pass through your mind, never, from any motive, or with any view, withhold from me your thoughts, your feelings, and your sorrows. What if they be momentary, winged thoughts, not native, that blowing weather has driven out of their course, and to which your mind has allowed thorough flight, but neither nest, perch, nor halting room? Send them onward to pass through mine; and between us both, we shall be better able to give a good account of them! What if they are the offspring of low or perturbed spirits--the changelings of ill health or disquietude? So much the rather communicate them. When on the white paper, they are already out of _us_; and when the letter is gone, they will not stay long behind; the very anticipation of the answer will have answered them, and superseded the need, though not the wish, of its arrival. And shall I not, think you, take them for what they are? With what comfort, with what security, could I receive or read your letters, or you mine, if we either of us had reason to believe, that whatever affliction had befallen, or discomfort was harassing, or anxiety was weighing on the heart, the other would say no word of or about it, under the plea of not transplanting thorns, or whatever other excuse a depressed fancy might invent, in order to transmute _unfriendly withholding_ into a self-sacrifice of tenderness. If you had come to stay with me while I lay on a bed of pain, it would grieve you indeed, if, from an imagined duty of not grieving you, I should suppress every expression of suffering, and not tell you where my pain was, or whether it was greater or less. _Grant_ that I was rendered anxious or heavy at heart, or keenly sorrowful, by any tidings you had communicated respecting yourself! _Should_ it not be so? Ought it not to be so? Will not the Joy be greater when the Cloud is passed off--greater in _kind_, nobler, better--because I should feel it was my _right_? And is there not a dignity and a hidden Healing in the suffering itself--which is soothed in the wish and tempered in the endeavour of removing, or lessening, or supporting it, in the Soul of a dear Friend? However trifling my vexations are, yet if they vex me, and I am writing to you, to you I will unbosom them, my dear ... and my serious sorrows and hindrances I will still less keep back from you. General Truths, Discussions, Poems, Queries--all these are parts of my nature, _often_ uppermost; and when they are so, you have them--and I like well to write to, and to hear from you on them--but these I might write to the Public: and with all Christian respect for that gentleman, I love your little finger better