It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don’t think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at).
There’s a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty…Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever
– unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.
– Thomas Aldrich, letter to Professor E.S. Morse, circa 1889
Words of the Sentient 