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I am glad you are so much more pleasantly situated than last winter: very glad that you have at least one companionable associate. I have felt somewhat troubled about you in that respect I believe no one can be absolutely without refined and cultivated companions without suffering in mind and manners. Have you any female society agreeable, refined, and improving? If you have not, you ought to set about procuring it without delay. have you any female correspondents now out of your own family? and, finally, is there any image entwined in the inner chamber of your soul leading you to contemplate the propriety of making some 'demonstrations?' If so I wish to be frankly and speedily informed. Your ideas respecting the influence of the love of nature upon the feelings and character, I fully agree with, I believe it tends to soften and refine the feelings, make one more kindly disposed towards the 'humanities', to yield a kindly drop of sympathy instead of steeling the heart in cold indifference: the feelings make the character:-- even Truth is not fully comprehended until felt, like the perceptions of beauty which appeals to the responses of the inward sensibilities' A deep moral sensibility, a natural love of the beautiful the good and the infinite, allies the soul to the spiritual world, - the great primal truths shine out when there like the stars; Sophistry may throw a mist over them as addressed to the intellect, but they look within and the clear images of heaven's lights come twinkling up from the depths of their moral consciousness? "There are human souls over whom their immortality broods like the day, - a presence not to be put by." These thoughts from the Biblical Repository came into my mind in connection with the subject of the influence of the love of nature or the love of the beautiful, so I thought I would write them to you,

Joseph has a soul keenly alive to seek impressions, but how has he suffered corroding care to shut out or eat up every green thing, I know he has been curiously interested and I do not blame him but I lament keenly the blightening effects of the last three years of his life.