I do not know why this one of the many treasures in our possession moved me most. God moves in a mysterious way—it may even be that Randolph Henry’s rebuff to my ancestress’s interest gave rise to my wish to show that we were, after all, worthy to understand, and, so to speak, to entertain him. Certainly I felt, when my father first handed me the handwritten pages, preserved in tissue, to see if I could decipher them, something akin to the thrill of Keats’s stout Cortez, silent on his peak in Darien. And when I had touched the letter, I felt, in Tennyson’s words, that the dead man had touched
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