]
follies of one's life, whereupon I will improvise a couplet upon the subject.
To her sister Louisa
May 17, 1847.
My sweetest beautifullest
Wevie,
... I have not written because I have been in a studious, meditative, and most uncommunicative frame of mind, and have very few words to throw at many dogs.
It is quite delightful to take to study again, and to feel that old and stupid as one may be, there is still in one's mind a little power of improvement.... The longer I live the more do I feel my utter childlike helplessness about all practical affairs.
Certainly a creature with such useless hands was never before seen.
I seem to need a dry nurse quite as much as my children.
What useful thing can I possibly teach these poor little monkeys?
For everything that is not soul I am an ass, that I am. I have now been at Green Peace some six weeks, and it is very pleasant and quiet, but oh!
the season is so backward; it is the 17th of May, and the trees are only beginning to blossom.
Every day comes a cold east wind to nip off my nose, and the devil a bit of anything else comes to Green Peace.
I am thin and languid.
I have never entirely recovered from my fever,
1 but my mind is clearer than it has ever been since my marriage.
I am able to think, to study and to pray, things which I cannot accomplish when my brain is oppressed....
