University of Virginia Library

LETTER CLXI.

At length I have obtained a respite from the cloud
of petitioners, applicants, pamphleteers, and projectors that
beset one, at the commencement, especially, of a session of
Congress; and sit down to converse with you on the subject

of your last and only letter. So far from "writing with
the eloquence of Rousseau," I fear that my letter will wear
an air of constraint—the effect of my anxiety to avoid making
a false impression on your mind, and of my own impoverished
and blighted faculties of heart and understanding.

I have never supposed you blind to the defects of my
character; neither have I been entirely insensible to those of
your own. If I could lay bare the moral anatomy of my
heart, I would not shrink from your inspection of all its
workings towards yourself, from the moment I first beheld
you, up to the present hour. During the more intimate connexion
which has subsisted between us some twenty years
past, I never did "distrust your affection for me," until the
summer before last. The surprise and anguish which then
overwhelmed me, you witnessed. I would not recall such
recollections, (it is the office of friendship to bury them in
oblivion,) but to put you in possession of the clew to my
feelings and conduct. I vlewed you as one ready and willing,
from the impulse of your own pride, to repay what you
considered a debt of gratitude, whilst you held the creditor
in aversion and contempt, that you could not at all times restrain
yourself from expressing by signs, and even by words.

On our meeting between this place and Baltimore, in 1811,
I would have given half what I possessed to have obtained
your confidence. From that time, I saw that there was
"something wrong"—but to interrogate you, would have
been to take an ungenerous and unmanly advantage of our
relative position, and I sought your confidence in no other
way but by giving you mine, without reserve. I little imagined,
at that time, that the letters which you afterwards put
into my hands, and which I have since perused with entire
approbation of their contents, regretting that I am now incapable
of taking such just views, (they were prompted by
a tenderness almost parental,) had any agency in producing
the reserve, which I saw and deplored, and vainly attempted
to remove.

Enough of this.—It is the office of friendship to accommodate

itself to mutual and incurable infirmities. To hear
of your happiness, next to seeing it, will give me as much
pleasure as I am now capable of feeling. My apathy is not
natural, but superinduced. There was a volcano under my
ice, but it is burnt out, and "a face of desolation has come
on, not to be rectified in ages," could my life be prolonged
to patriarchal longevity. The necessity of "loving, and
being beloved," was never felt by the imaginary beings of
Rousseau and Byron's creation more imperiously than by
myself. My heart was offered up with a devotion that knew
no reserve. Long an object of proscription and treachery,
I have at last (more mortifying to the pride of man) become
one of utter indifference. But these are the chastenings of
a tender Father, desirous to reclaim his lost and undone child
from the error of his ways, and who has "humbled my weak
unthinking pride beneath the dispensations of a mysterious
wisdom." To that wisdom, I bow with implicit and awful
submission; too happy, if I had not daily and hourly cause
to upbraid myself with the vilest ingratitude and disobedience
to my heavenly Corrector and Benefactor.

I wish I may have made myself entirely intelligible. If
I should have conveyed to your mind any impression that I
did not intend to make, I shall deplore it as the result of the
imperfection of language, as well as of my own incapacity
to use it.

The boys left Baltimore on Friday, for their grandfather's.
Tom had a hearty cry. Randolph, from the presence of numerous
spectators, was barely able to suppress his tears, and
I was no better off. How is C.?

May every blessing attend you here and hereafter! Need
I sign myself,