Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: above, he makes me contented to go un- ciphered, and I love everything better, my wife and boy, even cutting coats, I had almost said, as well as other pursuits we call higher. I hope what you wrote about Carlyle is not true. The fact of his veneration for Robert Burns goes a great way with me to prove its untruth; a good deal of virtuous indignation has been expended upon Burns, which seems likely to be all wasted, for we can't help loving him. It will take a thorough change of heart and one which would fit for some place beside a respectable heaven, to do other than love Burns. February, 1847. To J. D. Those '' grave " reflections of yours are rather, cool, John, for a man with such a young blooming wife as your Charlotte, tobe indulging in. But I sometimes have pleasant thoughts of the sleep that is to come—perchance under some little pine, in our cemetery, that may now be practising the dirge that it will sing over me—its faithful shadow daily and nightly in the sun and moonlight crossing my grave, and how comfortable we shall look in the winter packed away with our thick white coverlids, so carefully laid on and well tucked in about us. But we will hope to wake up in some great morning somewhere, sometime. Shall we remember these mornings here, in that morning, which we fain would hope will break on us bye-and-bye? These questionings are not answered; the curtain hiding the past and future is well fastened down. There are those who think they have vague reminiscences of the place from which they came, but death seems to be the admission fee for entrance to the place to which we are all going, and we get no reliable information concerning it from those who have preceded us. The experience we have had chapter{Section 4here, I think, has been a first-rate one, and...