I do not know whether you have seen my little books or not. I have published three in the last two years. The two prose books I thought I had a call to write, and the response they have received has shown that I was not wholly wrong.
Perhaps I have given myself too closely to writing, for I am far from well. Careful medical examination shows that I have organic heart-disease, which will need to be watched carefully in the future; I shall have to go slowly hereafter. Yet I have many plans that I want to carry out; and it is as necessary now as ever for me to earn my daily bread. But I am not in the least bit anxious. The kind of writing I do, does not bring much money, and I am not desirous of writing the kind that does.
These later years have been happy ones to me, because I have been doing things I like to do, and have had noble and sympathetic friends. One of my best friends--Whittier--is out of sight now, but I do not feel that he is far away. Life is one, in all the worlds, and it is life in God that unites us all. God in Christ is the great uniting reality to me. And yet I live so far from my ideal of what it is! How much more we should all be to each other, if we believed it, through and through!--
I cannot write, or do anything continuously, without pain in my chest, so I desist, with love to you and yours.
MY DEAR MISS FOBES,--I did not think it would be so long before your kind letters would be acknowledged, but the truth is that even a little book, if one’s heart is in the writing of it, is very absorbing,--and mine has taken all my time. I am reading the proof sheets of it now, and it will be out early in April. (I am visiting a friend here, for a week, trying to rest a rather tired head.)
These little books I have somehow been impelled to write, from the feeling that others might be helped, by seeing the way I had been led, and the point at which I had arrived. For I can but think of these later years as having been most plainly to myself under spiritual guidance. I prayed for it always. I remember walking alone in the woods behind Monticello Seminary, my heart asking with tears that I might suffer much, if so I could find the true secret of life. I have not suffered as many have,--I have only had ordinary trials and losses and matter-of-fact struggles with circumstances, but I have often been in danger of succumbing to lower standards than I believed in. But it has been the one effort of my life to keep in sight the highest and best, and to be satisfied with nothing less.