19th, 1840._ ---- was here. Generally I go out of
the room when he comes, for his great excitability makes
me nervous, and his fondness for detail is wearisome. But
to-night I was too much fatigued to do anything else, and
did not like to leave mother; so I lay on the sofa while she
talked with him.
'My mind often wandered, yet ever and anon, as I listened
again to him, I was struck with admiration at the
compensations of Nature. Here is a man, isolated from his
kind beyond any I know, of an ambitious temper and without an
object of tender affections and without a love or a friend. I
don't suppose any mortal, unless it be his aged mother, cares
more for him than we do,--scarce any value him so much. The
disease, which has left him, in the eyes of men, a scathed and
blighted tree, has driven him back to Nature, and she has not
refused him sympathy. I was surprised by the refinement of
his observations on the animals, his pets. He has carried
his intercourse with them to a degree of perfection we rarely
attain with our human friends. There is no misunderstanding
between him and his dogs and birds; and how rich has been the
acquaintance in suggestion! Then the flowers! I liked to
hear him, for he recorded all their pretty ways,--not like a
botanist, but a lover.
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