But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the
absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil, I have no
friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there
will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no
one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts
to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of
feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose
eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I
bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet
courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose
tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a
friend repair the faults of your poor brother! I am too ardent in execution
and too impatient of difficulties. But it is a still greater evil to me
that I am self-educated: for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild
on a common and read nothing but our Uncle Thomas’ books of voyages.
At that age I became acquainted with the celebrated poets of our own
country; but it was only when it had ceased to be in my power to derive its
most important benefits from such a conviction that I perceived the
necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that of my native
country. Now I am twenty-eight and am in reality more illiterate than many
schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more and that my
daydreams are more extended and magnificent, but they want (as the painters
call it) _keeping;_ and I greatly need a friend who would have sense
enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to
endeavour to regulate my mind.

Well, these are useless complaints; I shall certainly find no friend on the
wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel, among merchants and seamen. Yet
some feelings, unallied to the dross of human nature, beat even in these
rugged bosoms. My lieutenant, for instance, is a man of wonderful courage
and enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory, or rather, to word my phrase
more characteristically, of advancement in his profession. He is an
Englishman, and in the midst of national and professional prejudices,
unsoftened by cultivation, retains some of the noblest endowments of
humanity. I first became acquainted with him on board a whale vessel;
finding that he was unemployed in this city, I easily engaged him to assist
in my enterprise.
