These later years have been happy ones to me, because I have been doing things I like to do, and have had noble and sympathetic friends. One of my best friends--Whittier--is out of sight now, but I do not feel that he is far away. Life is one, in all the worlds, and it is life in God that unites us all. God in Christ is the great uniting reality to me. And yet I live so far from my ideal of what it is! How much more we should all be to each other, if we believed it, through and through!-- I cannot write, or do anything continuously, without pain in my chest, so I desist, with love to you and yours. Faithfully ever, LUCY LARCOM. TO MISS FOBES. ROXBURY, MASS., March 14, 1893. MY DEAR MISS FOBES,--I did not think it would be so long before your kind letters would be acknowledged, but the truth is that even a little book, if one’s heart is in the writing of it, is very absorbing,--and mine has taken all my time. I am reading the proof sheets of it now, and it will be out early in April. (I am visiting a friend here, for a week, trying to rest a rather tired head.) These little books I have somehow been impelled to write, from the feeling that others might be helped, by seeing the way I had been led, and the point at which I had arrived. For I can but think of these later years as having been most plainly to myself under spiritual guidance. I prayed for it always. I remember walking alone in the woods behind Monticello Seminary, my heart asking with tears that I might suffer much, if so I could find the true secret of life. I have not suffered as many have,--I have only had ordinary trials and losses and matter-of-fact struggles with circumstances, but I have often been in danger of succumbing to lower standards than I believed in. But it has been the one effort of my life to keep in sight the highest and best, and to be satisfied with nothing less. Now the best seems to me the simplest:--to receive, and to give by living it, the life of Christ. That is the thought I have kept before me in my little book, which I call “The Unseen Friend.” I shall send you a copy, as soon as possible.