to set his wits astir. By effort, and through numerous failures, he
must teach himself. The difficulties of the medium between him and
his distant friend, who is generally in a similar predicament, must
be surmounted. Gradually stiffness gives place to ease of composition,
roughness to elegance, awkwardness to grace and tact, until his
letters at length come to represent his mood, and to interest, if
not to delight, his correspondent. A rigid adherence to times and
places and ceremonial retards this process of growth and advance,
which is slow enough, at best.

But, although most correspondence is, from want of truthfulness,
thoughtfulness, life, good judgment, and good breeding, very
unsatisfactory, it cannot be denied that many good letters are
written every day. Between lovers, parents and children, real and
hearty friends, they pass. Young men on the threshold of life, while
discussing together the grave questions then encountered, write them.
Women, before their time to love and to be loved has come, or after
it is passed,--women, who, disappointed in the great hope of every
woman's life, turn to one another for support and shelter,--are
sending them by every post. Mr. De Quincey somewhere says, that in
the letters of English women, almost alone, survive the pure and racy
idioms of the language; and the German Wolf is said to have asserted,
that in corresponding with his betrothed he learnt the mysteries of
style.

Such letters as these are worth one's reading, because the utterance
is genuine and genial. The writers feel and express in every line an
interest in what they are writing, and do not recognize the
conventional rules which obtain where people rely less upon
inspirations from within than upon fixed general maxims for their