The sketch you give of her character leads me to
think she has a better chance of happiness than one in a hundred of
her sisterhood. Of pleasing exterior (that is always an
advantage--children like it), good sense, obliging disposition,
cheerful, healthy, possessing a good average capacity, but no
prominent master talent to make her miserable by its cravings for
exercise, by its mutiny under restraint--Louisa thus endowed will
find the post of governess comparatively easy. If she be like her
mother--as you say she is--and if, consequently, she is fond of
children, and possesses tact for managing them, their care is her
natural vocation--she ought to be a governess.
'Your sketch of Braxborne, as it is and as it was, is sadly pleasing.
I remember your first picture of it in a letter written a year
ago--only a year ago. I was in this room--where I now am--when I
received it. I was not alone then. In those days your letters often
served as a text for comment--a theme for talk; now, I read them,
return them to their covers and put them away. Johnson, I think,
makes mournful mention somewhere of the pleasure that accrues when we
are "solitary and cannot impart it." Thoughts, under such
circumstances, cannot grow to words, impulses fail to ripen to
actions.
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