I think America is a sort of 'United' States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world, should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably ungrammatical), particularly when they have been making themselves cruelly pleasant to friends here.

My friend Norton, whom I met first on this very blue lake water, had no business to go back to Boston again, any more than you....
"So you have been seeing the Pope and all his Easter performances! I congratulate you, for I suppose it is something like 'Positively the last appearance on any stage.' What was the use of thinking about _him_?
You should have had your own thoughts about what was to come after him.

I don't mean that Roman Catholicism will die out so quickly.

It will last pretty nearly as long as Protestantism, which keeps it up; but I wonder what is to come next.

That is the main question just now for everybody." W.J.Stillman had been a correspondent about 1851,--"involved in mystical speculations, partly growing out of the second volume of 'Modern Painters,'" as he said of himself in an article on "John Ruskin" in the _Century_ Magazine (January, 1888).