I don’t know what I have got to write about except your letter. I might string out considerable I suppose in answer to that—but there’s no particular occasion to.

I am very sorry and anxious for Miss Bacon and you may tell her so if you please—and for the rest of them. I can only congratulate you—I hope you will get well acquainted with Miss Mary Day. She’s another of them and well—but I told you all I could about her that night in the Avenue before the bell began not to stop. Thank you for what you say about ______. I’d just that sort of idea of her. I fell in love with her after my fashion last [243]winter. She’s got a regular angel face that would do first rate to stick into a Prayer Book, as well as answer more practical purposes. Did you see Mary Warburton in Hartford?

I think you are right about being sad. I do not think I am apt at all to be sorry or sad, without occasion, but I do very often have a day or two of gloom arising from a consciousness of neglect of duty of some sort, and in this way I am oftener miserable than you’d think perhaps. But I do think it is a man’s duty to be happy, at all events to appear happy. It’s one’s secret faults and not, rather than, those which are noticed by the world that make him displeased with himself. We ought to appear cheerful and contented (resigned) as well as kind and charitable. I don’t know but fretfulness and the blues bear the same relation to suicide that unkindness, uncharitableness, hard dealing and oppression do to murder.

I want to make myself useful in the world—to make happy—to help to advance the condition of Society and hasten the preparation for the Millennium—as well as other things too numerous to mention.

Now, how shall I prepare myself to exercise the greatest and best influence in the situation of life I am likely to be placed in? You know perhaps as well as I what that is. I suppose it’s no very great stretch of ambition to anticipate my being a Country Squire in Old Connecticut in the course of fifteen years. I should like to help then as far as I could—in the popular mind—generosity, charity, taste &c.—independence of thought, of voting and of acting. The education of the ignobile vulgus ought to be much improved and extended.

The Agricultural Interest greatly preponderates in number and wealth in the state—but perhaps has the least influence in Legislation. Lawyers—whose sense of right and truth is blunted by profession—the sense of law—and traffickers who value themselves as they can make their own interest appear—whether truly or not—the interest of another, make our laws, make public opinion, because they have had their intellectual faculties sharpened by practice—and education. Now the people—farmers and mechanics—the producing classes that the rest live on—want to think and judge for themselves, to cultivate the intellectual.

But my intellect wants a good deal of cultivation before I write an Essay on Political Economy; and you may—now—give me such advice as you please as to how to cultivate it. And my intellect wants a good deal more of it, I presume, than you are aware of. Few children that would have to strain harder than I to get their head outside a problem of E,—and since that fit last winter, I have been afraid to strain much for fear I should break something.

In study I am wonderfully lazy or weak and very soon get tired out. I am romantic—fanciful—jump at conclusions and yet always find headaches or convenient excuses when I want them. I have a smattering education—a [244]little sum, from most everything useful to such a man as I—learned as I took a fancy to it. Of Arithmetic, I cypher slow and without accuracy. Grammar I know nothing of—nor the rules of Rhetoric or writing. Geography, I know where I have been. History, nothing but of my own country—except what I have got incidently. I can’t even spell such a word as that right. But W. Trumbull can’t either—I believe they say so.

Fire away! It’s rather difficult to know where to begin or how, isn’t it? But withal I ought to be studying my profession all the time (instead of writing to you). And a bit of that difficulty just checks my symptoms here. Recollect brother, I don’t have but just time every day to say prayers and brush my teeth. You may as well tell me, too, how I am going to learn to write and speak to a whole school room full, &c.

I’ve told John and I suppose he will tell you how I have got my hands full of Sunday School. I have got to go down to Syracuse to purchase a Library. I think some of being sent to London as delegate to World’s Convention. If I go I shall get them to pass a Resolution that the Pope be informed that he is barking up the wrong tree and not hold any longer that he is a d_____d rascal and the son of the host of sin. About war I have concluded that if I am drafted I shall go and kill all the Mexicans I am told to—learn to eat frijoles, see a live Cathedral, and learn what they measure the floating gardens with. If there’s war with England I am not sure but I shall volunteer (so you needn’t worry). Get taken prisoner and see the world at their expense.

What’s become of Danbury R. R.? What do you think about the bridge? Are they laying up the tow-path—and what else is going on? How are all the fellows? Does Miss (you know) feel any way delicate about me? When is she coming this way? When do you hear from Emma?