"I am willing enough to employ all my thoughts upon _myself_, but
there is nobody here who wishes to think with or about me, so I am
very sick and a little sullen, and disposed now and then to say, like
king David, 'My lovers and my friends have been put away from me, and
my acquaintance hid out of my sight.' If the last letter I wrote
showed some degree of placid acquiescence in a situation, which,
however displeasing, is the best I can get at just now, I pray God to
keep me in that disposition, and to lay no more calamity upon me
which may again tempt me to murmur and complain. _In the meantime
assure yourself of my undiminished kindness and veneration: they have
been long out of accident's power either to lessen or increase."_....
"That _you_ should be solitary is a sad thing, and a strange one too,
when every body is willing to drop in, and for a quarter of an hour
at least, save you from a _tete-a-tete_ with yourself. I never could
catch a moment when you were alone whilst we were in London, and Miss
Thrale says the same thing."
A few days afterwards, June 19th, he writes:
"I am sitting down in no cheerful solitude to write a narrative which
would once have affected you with tenderness and sorrow, but which
you will perhaps pass over now with the careless glance of frigid
indifference. For this diminution of regard, however, I know not
whether I ought to blame you, who may have reasons which I cannot
know, and I do not blame myself, who have for a great part of human
life done you what good I could, and have never done you evil.
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