To Miss Jane Norton.

Friday evening [September, 1874].

... I went [to Magnolia] for only a day’s visit, — the last day, as I had heard, of Mrs. Lesley’s stay there. I had missed her on a previous visit, and had put off the second till the last moment. But my coming induced her to linger two days longer by the sea, — perfect days of autumn weather. We drove to see the Gurneys at Beverly on Saturday; and all the short time at the seaside seemed, while it lasted, to be a season off from Cambridge times and circumstances.

But now these have had their revenge, and put those days off into telescopic distance and minuteness. As usual, when I come back to Cambridge from long or short absences, I come to it like a clod to its native earth, with all motive impulses expended and satisfied.

Before I went away last week, I got my head full of “facts for Darwin” from the stores of knowledge in Mr. Sophocles, touching the gestures of the Eastern peoples he had known;

and especially the gestures of the head, which I have long speculated about in relation to optical theories. These facts fitted on to my older observations and speculations (and even a “Magnolia” perspective gave me one good related point of optics). I have now written it all out in a letter to Mr. Darwin; adding three new points on expression that I have picked up this week, — two of them from Mr. Lowell, on the gestures of the Italians. I read to him on Wednesday all the rest I had set down. So you see I have not been idle, nor left entirely without explanation the appearance of coldness towards the attractions of Ashfield. I suppose that now, having got the matter all down in black and white, I shall gradually harden my heart towards it; so that when we meet I shall look upon it and treat it as a weak enthusiasm, — as old people look upon athletic sports. It is well that I did not sooner quench my thoughts in ink; for it seems to leave me without resource to turn to.

What satisfaction there must be in the habit of reading! The power to give one’s self up graciously to a book is the wealthiest habit, I imagine, that one can acquire. It is fulness itself, or an endless and ever-ready resource. To make books is to have one’s hive robbed. Now, I attack a book as a bee does a petunia, not reaching its honey delicately, as its regular customers, the night-moths, do; but biting into its nectary, or breaking in like a burglar. Yet the bee is accounted by moralists the more virtuous insect; the rule in the moral world being, since all fall so far short of perfection, to award praise where praise is most needed as a motive, rather than most fit or deserved in an absolute way. Still, I think bees and ants (as well as their Author) are much misunderstood by moralists; they love the excitement of their brisk business, and stand in no such need of praise or social support for a motive, as the lazy, unproductive people do who are sent to observe and imitate them. The rationale of rewards and

punishments has to do with the use of them, and involves essentially the short-comings of the agent, or the feebleness of motives to actions, as well as the absolute value of the actions themselves. Hence, hymns of praise seem to the practical utilitarian a sort of fetish worship, or else hyperbolical,— misleading either way, as matters of reverent belief. — The chief end of morals, however, seems to be to afford topics for my letters!