1756 (undated)

Anne Steele, [Broughton], to Lucius [Philip Furneaux], undated (c. 1756).

To Lucius,

Your Discourses on Happiness have afforded me an agreeable entertainment for which I return my thanks.

Though our narrow thoughts can never grasp the infinite Idea yet may we pursue the exhaustless Theme and find new pleasure still new Wonders new Glories forever opening to our view!—

How infinitely beyond our most exalted conceptions must the full the everlasting enjoyment of that Happiness be ^of which^ the least true solid hope yields abundantly more satisfaction than the possession of every Earthly good in their largest increase—these are so far from giving satisfaction that without this Hope they are misery! The Empire of the World would leave us poor and wretched!—How agreeably expressive are those verses of D^r Watts.

Were I possessor of the Earth

And call’d the Stars my own

Without thy Graces and thy Self

I were a wretch undone

Let others stretch their arms like Seas

And grasp in all the shore

Grant me the visits of thy Face

And I desire no more

This is the highest the only Happiness to be enjoy’d on Earth, the foretaste of that Eternal inconcievable Felicity which only can satisfy the boundless wishes of the immortal Soul

Text: STE 3/13/iii, Steele Collection, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford. No address page. For an annotated version of this letter, see Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 2, ed. Julia B. Griffin, p. 285.