Your letter describes what I _have_ felt rather than what I feel. It seems as if my affections were quietly sinking down to temperate, and I every day seem more and more to value thought rather than feeling. I do not think this is man's best estate, but it is better than what I have sometimes known.
[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday evening, autumn of 1845.]
I am not ashamed to confess that I should like to be idle with you for a little while, more than anything else I can think of just now. But, alas! leathery brain must work at leathery Strauss for a short time before my butterfly days come. O, how I shall spread my wings then! Anent the Greek, it would produce very dreadful cold perspirations indeed in me, if there were anything amounting to a serious error, but this, I trust, there will not be. You must really expect me, if not to sleep and snore _aliquando_, at least to nod in the course of some thousand pages. I should like you to be deliberate over the _Schluss Abhandlung_. It is the only part on which I have bestowed much pains, for the difficulty was _piquing_, not piquant.
[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, no date, 1845.]
I am never pained when I think Strauss right; but in many cases I think him wrong, as every man must be in working out into detail an idea which has general truth, but is only one element in a perfect theory--not a perfect theory in itself.
[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 25th Sept. 1845.]
I am delighted with the proof. The type and everything else are just what I wished. To see the first sheet is the next best thing to seeing the last, which I hope we shall all have done this time next year. There is a very misty vision of a trip to the Highlands haunting us in this quarter. The vision would be much pleasanter if Sara were one of the images in it. You would surely go if we went, and then the thing would be perfect. I long to see you, for you are becoming a sort of transfigured existence, a mere ideal to me, and I have nothing to tell me of your real flesh-and-blood self but sundry very useful little pencil-marks, and a scrap of Mrs. Bray's notes now and then. So, if you would have me bear in my memory your own self, and not some aerial creation that I call by your name, you must make your appearance.