To Professor Lesley.

Cambridge, May 31, 1865.

... If any thing could diminish the sympathy I feel with your disappointment in being obliged to give way to invalidism and to take a vacation, it is the pleasure I anticipate from your promised visits. They will be more grateful to me than seashore or mountain, and I look forward with impatience to the days when you will come with your budget of “things to discuss.”

We may find the mountains or the seashore good grounds for our rational picnic, though we only go to them for the pleasure of losing sight of them. No day of last summer comes more distinctly and pleasurably to my recollection than that on which we climbed Wachusett together, — and greater heights than that, in discourse.