He goes on to tell her (herein echoing Hunt's opinion) how much better it would be if Italian instead of French were taught everywhere in schools, and winds up:--
Now Fanny you must write soon--and write all you think about, never mind what--only let me have a good deal of your writing--You need not do it all at once--be two or three or four days about it, and let it be a diary of your Life. You will preserve all my Letters and I will secure yours--and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good Bundle--which, hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and God knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on times past--that now are to come.
Next follows another letter to Jane Reynolds; partly making fun, much better fun than in the last, about Dilke's shooting and about the rare havoc he would like to make in Mrs Dilke's garden were he at Hampstead: partly grave in the high style into which he is apt at any moment to change from nonsense:--
Now let us turn to the sea-shore. Believe me, my dear Jane, it is a great happiness to see that you are, in this finest part of the year, winning a little enjoyment from the hard world. In truth, the great Elements we know of, are no means comforters: the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of state--the Earth is our throne and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before it--able, like David's harp, to make such a one as you forget almost the tempest cares of life. I have found in the ocean's music,--varying (tho' self-same) more than the passion of Timotheus, an enjoyment not to be put into words; and, 'though inland far I be,' I now hear the voice most audibly while pleasing myself in the idea of your sensations.
To Reynolds Keats writes on September the 21st:--
For these last five or six days, we have had regularly a Boat on the Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your eye-lashes. We sometimes skim into a Bed of rushes, and there become naturalized river-folks,--there is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened 'Reynolds's Cove,' in which we have read Wordsworth, and talked as may be; I think I see you and Hunt meeting in the Pit.--What a very pleasant fellow he is, if he would give up the sovereignty of a room pro bono. What evenings we might pass with him, could we have him from Mrs H. Failings I am always rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for; they bring us to a level.