though I assumed a very independent tone in speaking of my journey when I found it was utterly impossible for cousin to accompany me. He is an old friend of cousin's, though young—only twenty-five—and there is an air of youth and immaturity about all his opinions and actions; but his spirit is so beautiful that you have only to see in order to love it, so pure and gentle, so true and genial. In my opinion he belongs to a class of young Englishmen that I find is large and constantly increasing. Cousin S. is one of them. They are reformers in spirit, but not destroyers; they have no clear immediate plan of reform, and so earnestly maintain the present system until they find a better one; but they are all the time seeking for truth, and longing most earnestly to realise that grand future in which they all believe. Fichte is one of their favourite teachers; Carlyle, Emerson, Channing, all we have known and learned from in the past, they worship now; but they have yet to study Fourier and Swedenborg before they can reach that strong hope and clear insight which will make their working strong, happy, and practically efficient. Now, there is too much of metaphysical abstraction in their thoughts, their religious faith is not a glorious reality, and in the case of our friend Charles, he despises the material world too much, and seeks to subdue the body and purify the spirit by privations which proceed from the noblest motive but a mistaken faith.
I have a curious interest in seeing and hearing him; it revives so completely my earlier life, when I thought as he does now, and strove for the same ends by the same means. My medical effort won his admiration before I arrived, and since I came here he has done me every little service in his power. His family is an old and highly respected one in Birmingham, and when he found I wished to see something of medicine in the city he used his influence to arrange a useful day for me.
