FEBRUARY 26
I have often thought of you as possessing everything which the world calls enviable or delightful: health, friends, leisure. … Permit me to entreat you to look beyond all these for happiness.
The dangers of prosperity are great; and you seem aware of them. If poverty contracts and depresses the mind, riches sap its fortitude, destroy its vigor, and nourish its caprices.
But the chief disadvantage of an elevated situation is this: it removes us from scenes of misery and indigence; we are apt to charge the great with want of feeling, but it is rather want of consideration.
to Dr. Wrangel, 1770
