Your letter of January 28 was not received till February 9. The Oaks,
for some months visited only at intervals, when the feelings the world
thought gone by were not to be controlled, was the asylum I sought. It
was there, in the chamber of my wife, where every thing was disposed
as usual; with the clothes, the books, the play-things of my boy
around me, that I sustained this second shock, doubled in a manner
that I could not account for. My son seemed to have been reanimated,
to have been restored to me, and to have just perished again with his
mother. It was the loss of both pressing upon me at the same moment.
Should it be my misfortune to live a Century, the 30th of June and the
10th of February are so impressed upon my mind that they will always
seem to have just passed. I visited the grave of my boy. The little
plans we had all three formed rushed upon my memory. Where now was the
boy? The mother I cherished with so much pride? I felt like the very
spirit of desolation. If it had not been for a kind of stupefaction
and confusion of mind which followed, God knows how I should have
borne it. Oh, my friend, if there be such a thing as the sublime of
misery, it is for us that it has been reserved.
You are the only person in the world with whom I can commune on this
subject; for you are the only person whose feelings can have any
community with mine.
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