TO JOSEPH ADDISON

_A few thoughts from a rambling head_


14 _Dec_. 1713.

I have been lying in wait for my own imagination, this week and more,
and watching what thoughts came up in the whirl of the fancy, that
were worth communicating to you in a letter. But I am at length
convinced that my rambling head can produce nothing of that sort; so
I must e'en be content with telling you the old story, that I love
you heartily. I have often found by experience, that nature and
truth, though never so low or vulgar, are yet pleasing when openly and
artlessly represented: it would be diverting to me to read the very
letters of an infant, could it write its innocent inconsistencies and
tautologies just as it thought them. This makes me hope a letter from
me will not be unwelcome to you, when I am conscious I write with more
unreservedness than ever man wrote, or perhaps talked, to another. I
trust your good nature with the whole range of my follies, and really
love you so well, that I would rather you should pardon me than esteem
me; since one is an act of goodness and benevolence, the other a kind
of constrained deference.

You cannot wonder my thoughts are scarce consistent, when I tell you
how they are distracted. Every hour of my life my mind is strangely
divided; this minute perhaps I am above the stars, with a thousand
systems round about me, looking forward into a vast abyss, and
losing my whole comprehension in the boundless space of creation, in
dialogues with Whiston and the astronomers; the next moment I am below