Your Letter from Cambridge arrived yesterday my dear Charles and I was sorry to find you still suffered from your old nervous timidity—Do not however despair I struggled many years of my life from against the same difficulty but fortunately conquered it and now can almost generally command myself—Habit and constant practice will soon get the better of this very unpleasant sensation and reading...
It is an old fashion thus to begin a Letter but there is something so pleasant in the spontaneous feeling which dictates the words, that I write or indeed find them written, ere I am aware that my Letter is begun; so that tho’ fashion is a tyrant ruler, and I generally submit with very good will to its sway, reason sometimes (not often) as you once observed takes the lead, and nolens volens...
The Mail is this moment arrived and as I am at leisure I hasten to answer your Letter which is a very good one if it had been a little more legible to read.—Hard things to get at are we know often thought more valuable but Enigma’s but would be worthless if we never discovered their meaning—I therefore again pray you to attend to your hand writing and to write a large hand which will correct...
I have again received a Letter from you my Dear Charles which I hasten to answer at least to quiet your fears concerning my health which although I cannot say it is good is not such as to make you anxious or give serious cause for uneasiness— President Kirkland has written to your father concerning John and has announced dissmission and postponement of the Degree and I presume we shall have...
Your Letter of the 10th. my Dear Charles afflicted me very much as it still betrayed the same spirit which has already cost your brother so much and which if not timely quelled may end in crimes at which my soul shudders with horror—Let me ask you once more, are you or any of the young person’s who are at College while your passions are excited to fury I say are you capable of judging...
I received yesterday my dear Charles your Letter of the 4th. and hasten to answer it as I really feel anxious lest the heated atmosphere in which you appear to have lived for the last week or two should produce have a bad effect and produce the fever which is so common at Cambridge towards the end of a term and generally so frightfully infectious— We are much obliged to you for the information...
Being better to day my dear Charles I hasten to write to you fearful if I delay that a Chill and another attack of fever should prevent me and deprive you of hearing how George comes on—We are at present very anxious on account of a violent spasmodic affection of the muscles which are very considerably contracted and make it impossible to straighten the arm—he moves the fingers but cannot hold...
Your Letter is this moment brought me and I really cannot conceive what you mean my Dear Charles by John’s thirteen Letter a week or who the numerous correspondents can be from whom he receives them—I am perfectly sure that neither of you could take time to read them much less to answer them—The roads have been so bad that the course of the Mails has been much interrupted and I fear I have not...
Your brother my Dear Charles is much better and his arm doing well though it will probably be a long time before it will be of any use to him. He is entirely without fever and his health in consequence of leaving off tobacco in all its forms is better than it has been a long time. Both his Surgeons have agreed that he is undermining and destroying his Constition which cannot support any...
Your father was amused by your last Letter and glad to learn that you were pleased with any part of your studies and thinks that your distate of Mathematics may decrease as you advance in your course—George is gone to Rockville to visit Johnson whose health is very indifferent in consequence he says of severe study and probably some other nameless causes—He has not been up since you saw him...