Abandon, I pray you, the exploded formula of selfishness!... I think one should be capable of loving virtue, were one sure even that hell and not heaven would be its reward. The benedictions of the Sermon on the Mount are very simple--no raptures, no ecstasies are promised. Blessed are all that seek the good of others and the knowledge of truth--blessed, simply that in so doing they obey the law of God, imitate His character, and coming nearer and nearer to Him shall find Him more and more in their hearts. One word about Unitarians. It is very wrong to say that they reject the Bible, simply because they interpret it in a different manner from the (so-called) orthodox, or that they reject Christ, because they understand him in one way, and you in another--while they emulate his wonderful life, while they acknowledge his divine mission, and the divine power of his words, why should they be said to despise him?... During the years between 1843 and 1859, her life was from time to time shadowed by the approach of a great joy. Before the birth of each successive child she was oppressed by a deep and persistent melancholy. Present and future alike seemed dark to her; she wept for herself, but still more for the hapless infant which must come to birth in so sorrowful a world. With the birth of the child the cloud lifted and vanished. Sunshine and joy--and the baby--filled the world; the mother sang, laughed, and made merry. In her letters to her sisters, and later in her journals, both these moods are abundantly evident. At first, these letters are full of the bustle of arrival and of settling in the Institution. "I received the silver.... The soup-ladle is my delight, and I could almost take the dear old coffee-pot to bed with me.... But here is the most important thing. "MY TRAGEDY IS LEFT BEHIND!... My house ... in great confusion, carpets not down, curtains not up, the devil to pay, and not a sofa to ask him to sit down upon...." She now felt sadly the need of training in matters which her girlhood had despised. (She could describe every room in her father's house save one--the kitchen!) The Doctor liked to give weekly dinners to his intimates, "The Five of Clubs," and others. These dinners were something of a nightmare to Julia, even with the aid of Miss Catherine Beecher's cookbook. She spent weeks in studying this volume and trying her hand on its recipes. This was not what her hand was made for; yet she learned to make puddings, and was proud of her preserves. Speaking of the dinner parties, she tells of one for which she had taken special pains, and of which ice-cream, not then the food of every day, was to form the climax. The ice-cream did not come, and her pleasure was spoiled; she found it next morning in a snowbank outside the back door, where the messenger had "dumped" it without word or comment. "I should laugh at it now," she says, "but then I almost wept over it."