Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 August 1875 — Old Letters. [ARTICLE]

Old Letters.

A eorrespondentte from youth to an age more or lessm&tw is a possession to all whom It may conefern, if people h#ve the leisure, andwe nifty certainly ftdd courage, to Esejft fojjbld letters have some, thing akin to sleeping dogs and torpid tnake9. To rip up old sorrows and grievances and mistakes, to live again the Excitements pf, boyhood, to fight agai< the battles ohee of such enthralling importance, to safer once again the private snubs, the family trials and disappointments, to revive the old loyes ana hates and successes, to come into close intercourse once more with those who have passed away to meet friends of another generation who helped to make them what they are, for good or evil, to subject former objects of their admiration or reverence to the test of maturer judgment, to raise the ghost of their old selves and draw comparisons—how eager »nce where now indifferent, how positive where opinion has now turned round, how dictatorial where now hesitating, how loving where now estranged—all this is a judicial process to those who have the courage to face it. The decline of a friendship is among the sadnesses of this retrospect, bringing back ag it does the attractive qualities, the intellect, the tenderness, the personal regard Which have got themselves obscured under subsequent misunderstandings aud resentments. There is nothing in which men differ more than in the amount of themselves which they put into a letter; and where a lost friend had this power it is next to impossible for recent authors to make head against the sudden recognition awakened by some happy touch. Old intercourse may never be renewed, but feeling adjusts itself to a more charitable standard, and henceforth memory reverts to early dates for its specimen tints and images". Such at least should be the result of this clearing and, as it were, tidying up of our past as a moral act. It is a sort of murder to destroy a good letter —a letter instinct with life, feeling and observation, and some v.ery good ones there must be to constitute a collection worth the trouble first of keepingand then of reperusing. The taste for hoarding and the taste for destruction, both holding a place in every human bosom,- find equal indulgence in the''task before us. Destruction must come at last to all, but there is a satisfaction of averting the doom for a time. A family must be ill off for heirs if there is no one to succeed to the selection which the contention between these two impulses leaves as a residuum; and it is wonderful what the anticipation of one interested, grateful reader yet unborn will do to recompense the labor involved in the task on which we have been commenting.— London Saturday Review.