My dear Whitley

I have been very long in answering your kind letter: but now I have some news to tell you, which, I am sure will please you, as holding out to me, the best chance of happiness, mortal man can boast of in this world.—

It can be nothing else, but that I am going to be married. The lady is my cousin Miss Emma Wedgwood.— you will approve of marrying a cousin:¹ & if you knew what a good dear little wife, the lady will surely make, you would approve still more, & congratulate me, heartily, on my good fortune.—

We are to be married in the end of January, & intend living in London, at least for some years, until I have wearied the geological public with my newly acquired cacoethes scribendi.— I have a busy, & therefore a happy life before me, with a comfortable, though rather humble, fireside to spend my evenings, & the evening of my life by the side of, that is, if I have the luck to live so long.— My future wife is a very good musician, so that I m⁠⟨⁠ea⁠⟩⁠n to acquire first rate taste in music, & nothing less than symphonies of Beethoven shall go down.—

I am glad to find from your letter that science is not so much at a discount with you as formerly: although I believe it was always rather more theoretically so, than practically.— I am glad to find, you wondered properly at Glen Roy.— I cannot get people to be half enough astonished at it.— I saw nothing in my perigrinations to the Antipodes, nearly so curious in physical geography.— I do not doubt they are old sea-beaches: & many most curious inferences may be, I believe, deduced from the fact.— This is a marvellous world we live in, & I never cease marvelling at it. But just at this present time I marvel more at the prospect of having a real, live, goodly wife to myself than at all the hundred wonders of the world.

I am very much obliged for your kind invitation northward.— I fear it will be long before I shall be able to bend my steps that way: I often regret, how little I see of my good old friends: but the recollection of them & of Cambridge days & of our long walks often gives me real happiness. Heaviside flourishes at Heyleibury:² I was astonished the other day by being hailed by a Revd. Prof. of that College, as President: which was explained to me by being informed that Heaviside had stated over what a noble club—I had once Presided.³

Good bye, my dear Whitley, | Most truly yrs, C. Darwin