I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness--I have enough
of self-crimination without adding imaginary articles--but in all
things that affect my moral feelings I have sunk under such a strange
cowardice of pain that I have not unfrequently kept letters from
persons dear to me for weeks together unopened. After a most miserable
passage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which my life was twice
given over, I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless,
and worse than homeless. I had been near a month in the country before
I ventured or could summon courage enough to ask a question concerning
you and yours, and yet God Almighty knows that every hour the thought
had been gnawing at my heart. I then for the first time heard of that
event which sounded like my own knell, without its natural hope or
sense of rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but O!
not such; O! with what a different retrospect! But I owe it to justice
to say, Such good I truly can do myself, etc., etc." The rest of this
painfully inarticulate letter is filled with further complaints of ill
health, with further protestations of irresponsibility for the neglect
of duties, and with promises, never to be fulfilled, of composing or
assisting others to compose a memoir of Thomas Wedgwood, who, in
addition to his general repute as a man of culture, had made a special
mark by his speculations in psychology.
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