plague of school and the dull routine of a little my fir voyage my bosom of this perilous stuff i came home a and a wiser lad � but i had to for another voyage and sailed the sea twenty six long years at the end i came back to the little an ancient with no property but the clothes on my back some about my travels gray hair and a to burden my family and look after my do what you like only be careful to go to sea with a i rarely give advice but i can recommend you never to do anything without seeing where your path goes and if you can keep the old road you will find the beaten track pleasanter on the whole and if the scenery is tame the accommodation is good at the your friend hope made me laugh as i say by his cool to your mother s tenderness he has an old head on young shoulders he told me was thrown into an agreeable excitement by your disappearance mrs was in consternation to lose so quiet a with such a small appetite and the good soul really feared that the hard fare of the university must have driven you desperate a few of the young ladies have manifested some sympathy and set you down as a rejected pray your mother s distressed heart by writing her we are in a here i have had a notion i would get a lawyer s advice � perhaps we could take you with a but it is a good way to send a s and it would be a blank business to have a non est returned your mother me to engage youth of the and the painter july a vehicle and drive down myself your sister suggests we bribe you to come back by the offer of a study and pens a library and permission to pass a week in seclusion what we shall resolve say in the time i puff my pipe at my leisure in the garret and read some old french plays i bought at a book stall your uncle james hope to edward i acknowledge what you say of outline is partly true my dear but i think you have drawn too hasty a conclusion we must in art make a beginning � to leap from the outset to the end cannot produce any work above that of a it is the fault of our time to escape to mar by haste and to suggest rather than perfect i am to hear you remark you wish the poet s power belonged to you for i have always thought you were born to write verse i console myself by reflecting that every true poet has felt this deficiency at the outset and my was the result of the same want of maturity i find everywhere for how could i require you just beginning to write to produce anything sublime i want courage to assert my right to the pencil as much as you do to the pen i believe our age is not only that of but of we are neither willing to nor confide we finish in haste and read our failure of necessity when i consider how the masters who have stamped eternal foot prints in the sands of time spent years in writing characters which were instantly washed out resolve to sit in love and admiration and value my formed as some tendency towards real beauty as the to the bible of art my outlines in this light are worth preserving and i grieve that i was not possessed of this patience years ago for it would have led me to keep my first sketches and i might now see such a change for the better make golden my of the poet and the painter aspirations so much do we learn in and so unfortunate it seems to grow old early and this holiday floor where in games we harvest deep experience i have been long laboring at outlines yet feel i have accomplished little compared with what i might other pursuits have so my time i have not yielded to your earnest request to dwell only in art to abandon these college studies in short to identify my whole external existence with the beautiful i prize the unselfish enthusiasm that leads you to desire for your friend only the happiest results for your sake i should love to yield myself entirely to the radiant sunlight of picture and dispense with the cold economy of the world what will you think if i confess i have not that confidence me to say entirely that i can produce anything to warrant me in following an artist s life an irresistible impulse draws me to landscape i take my pencil but the scenes do not flow warm and living in a measure i satisfy myself yet not to that extent i desire you will send the lesson i have just read on haste and the necessity of taking degrees in art step by step alas i find i can read lessons to everybody better than practise them it would not avail to be an amateur i must be all or nothing and in fully feeling this i found my right to come a painter he who truly to the has the consolation of knowing he can make no failure yet to ass life in stepping from one stone to another would not be sufficient excuse for what other avenues i may have to knowledge i am an man all i hear all i see all i do is but the faint uncertain dawn of what i am equal to and it would be a sensation profoundly satisfactory did i seize what jewels are strewn by the way but i seem to be carried forward with such rapidity that i cannot stoop to seize even these i am possessed 