If she considers for a moment within herself,
she will know that she derived pleasure from everything she saw,
because she saw it with innumerable lights and shades upon it, and
bound to humanity by innumerable fine links; she cannot possibly
communicate anything of that pleasure to another by showing it from one
little limited point only, and that point, observe, the one from which
it is impossible to detach the exponent as the patroness of a whole
universe of inferior souls. This is what everybody would mean in
objecting to these notes (supposing them to be published), that they
are too smart and too flippant.
As I understand this matter to be altogether between us three, and as I
think your confidence and hers imposes a duty of friendship on me, I
discharge it to the best of my ability. Perhaps I make more of it than
you may have meant or expected; if so, it is because I am interested
and wish to express it. If there had been anything in my objection not
perfectly easy of removal, I might, after all, have hesitated to state
it; but that is not the case. A very little indeed would make all this
gayety as sound and wholesome and good-natured in the reader's mind as
it is in the writer's.
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