September 12. Is it always selfish to yield to depression? Can one help it, if the perspective of a coming year of lonely labor seems very long? No. I shall not be alone; I shall feel the sympathy of all the good and true, though apart from them; and though I cannot come very near to any under this roof, yet to all I can come nearer than I think I can. And by and by these strange restless yearnings will be stilled; I shall quiet my soul in the peace of God. He has said, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee!” Oh! what is any woman’s life worth without the friendship of the One ever near, the only divine? Yes, I will make my work my friend. My trials, my vexations, my cares, shall speak good words to me, and I will not blind my eyes to the beauty close at hand, because of the lost glory of my dreams. I wish I could be more to all these young glad beings,--it is not in me to touch the chords of many souls at once, but I will enlarge my sympathies. October 5, 1861. This first week of October, this month of months, shall not pass without some record of its beauty. Norton woods and Norton sunsets are the two redeeming features of the place; as its levelness is its bane. What is it in us that refuses to love levels? Is it that there is no searching and toiling for anything, up cool heights and down in sheltered hollows? These splendidly tinted maples before my window would be a hundred-fold more splendid if lifted up among the hemlocks and pines of the mountainsides. Oh! how magnificent those New Hampshire hills must be now, in the sunset of the year! The place is a level, and boarding-school life is a most wearisome level to me, yet flowers spring up, and fruits grow in both. We are to welcome “all that makes and keeps us low;” yet it seems to me as if it would be good for me to ascend oftener to the heights of being; I fear losing the power and the wish to climb. Let us say we are struggling to put down slavery, and we shall be strong. October 8. Yesterday two letters came to me, each from a friend I have never seen, yet each with a flower-like glow and perfume that made my heart glad. And at evening a graceful little basket of fruit was left in my room, and this morning a bunch of fringed gentians, blue with the thoughtfulness of the sky that hangs over the far solitary meadows, the last answer from earth to heaven from the frosty fields. October 11. Rain: and just one of those dreary drizzling rains which turn one in from the outer world upon one’s own consciousness,--a most unhealthy pasture land for thought, in certain states of mind and body. Just how far we should live in self-consciousness, and how far live an outside life, or rather, live in the life of others, is a puzzle. Without something of an inner experience, it is not easy to enter into other lives, to their advantage; some self-knowledge is necessary, to keep us from intruding upon others; but it is never good to make self the centre of thought.