that wrote it must abide his time. He needs, as indeed all men do, the
_faith_ that this world is built not on falsehood and jargon but on
truth and reason; that no good thing done by any creature of God was,
is, or ever can be _lost_, but will verily do the service appointed
for it, and be found among the general sum-total and all of things
after long times, nay after all time, and through eternity itself. Let
him 'cast his bread upon the waters,' therefore, cheerful of heart;
'he will find it after many days.'

"I know not why I write all this to you; it comes very spontaneously
from me. Let it be your satisfaction, the highest a man can have in
this world, that the talent entrusted to you did not lie useless,
but was turned to account, and proved itself to be a talent; and the
'publishing world' can receive it altogether according to their own
pleasure, raise it high on the housetops, or trample it low into the
street-kennels; that is not the question at all, the _thing_ remains
precisely what it was after never such raising and never such
depressing and trampling, there is no change whatever in _it_. I bid
you go on, and prosper.

"One thing grieves me: the tone of sadness, I might say of settled
melancholy that runs through all your utterances of yourself. It is
not right, it is wrong; and yet how shall I reprove you? If you knew
me, you would triumphantly[A] for any spiritual endowment bestowed
on a man, that it is accompanied, or one might say _preceded_ as the
first origin of it, always by a delicacy of organisation which in
a world like ours is sure to have itself manifoldly afflicted,
tormented, darkened down into sorrow and disease. You feel yourself an
exile, in the East; but in the West too it is exile; I know not where
under the sun it is not exile. Here in the Fog Babylon, amid mud