when I look to the ineffable pleasures of my family society, I become more & more disgusted with the jealousies, the hatred, & the rancorous & malignant passions of this scene, & lament my having ever again been drawn into public view.

I envy those who stay at home, enjoying the society of their friendly neighbors, blessed with their firesides, and employed in doing something every day which looks usefully to futurity.

of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful a tooth, as indolence. body & mind both unemployed, our being becomes a burthen, & every object about us loathsome, even the dearest. idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondria, & that a diseased...

a mind always employed is always happy. this is the true secret, the grand recipe for felicity. the idle are the only wretched. in a world which furnishes so many emploiments which are useful, & so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we we ever know what ennui is, or if we are ever...

Your two last letters are those which have given me the greatest pleasure of any I ever recieved from you. The one announced that you were become a notable housewife, the other a mother. this last is undoubtedly the key-stone of the arch of matrimonial happiness, as the first is it’s daily aliment.

you were never more mistaken than in supposing you were too long on the prattle &c. of little Anne. I read it with quite as much pleasure as you write it.

these reveries ... leave me always impressed with the desire of being at home once more, and of exchanging labour, envy, and malice, for ease, domestic occupation, & domestic love & society, where I may once more be happy with you, with mr. Randolph, & dear little Anne, with whom even...

I hope you are getting well, towards which great care of yourself is necessary: for however adviseable it is for those in health to expose themselves freely, it is not so for the sick. you will be out in time to begin your garden, & that will tempt you to be out a great deal, than which...

A death-bed Adieu. Th:J. to MR....

We have reached our journey's end in safety my dearest Mother, having met with no accident on the road, no misadventure of any kind, except being driven in to Hunter’s yesterday morning by a shower of rain, which forced us to take a neat comfortable breakfast at half after seven o clock, instead...