"Perhaps you are already pulling up your tent-pegs: rather a heart- breaking work, especially to those who so love beauty and have surrounded themselves within doors with so much. You _need_, dear friend, a broad and fruitful field in London for your spiritual activity to recompense the great--the very great--sacrifices you must make in parting from all that you have loved in Liverpool. I have felt this so deeply that I never knew exactly how to _wish_ that you might come to London; and, indeed, this place, so emphatically _dissipated_," [that is, _mente dissipatá distractá_] "does not prize its great minds so much as smaller places would. ... Beloved friend, you know that great expectations are formed of you. It is hard, most hard, not to let this draw you into great intellectual effort, from which I fear much. For your literary lecturing, of course, I have no word of dissuasion. But let me assure you that in your preaching there is _superfluous_ intellectual effort. It would be spiritually more effective if there were far less perfection of literary beauty and less condensation of refined thought and imaginative metaphor. I hear again and again from _intellectual_ persons the complaint that the effort to follow your meaning is too great, and impairs both the pleasure and profit of listening to you. I myself am conscious that wonder and admiration of your talent is apt to absorb and stifle the properly spiritual influence, and when I _read_ your sermons, I often pause so long on single sentences as to be fully aware that I could have got little good from _hearing_ them. I know that no two men's nature is the same, and habit is a second nature. Do not imagine that I wish you not to be yourself. (There is no danger of that.) But I am sure that by cultivating more of what the French call 'abandon'--by preparing with less _intellectual_ effort for each separate sermon--though, of course, not with less devotional purpose--and by letting your immediate impulse have a large play in comparison to your previous study, there will be less danger of overworking your mind and fuller effect on those who are to benefit. ... I dare say you received from me the new volume of _Religious Duties_. Its author seems to me _primitively_ to have belonged to what you call the class of ethical minds, but to have passed beyond it, and now to be at once Passionate and Spiritual. And is not this the natural and rightful thing, that though we begin with a fragmentary, we tend towards an integral religion? This book has been to me most delightful and profitable, and I trust you will also find it so. Such a revelation of a pure, tender, ardent spirit is itself an inexpressible stimulus, and has given me quite a flood of joy and sympathy.