Your little letter breathes all your characteristic courage and philosophy--while, I confess, at the same time, it fills out--or rather perhaps, more exactly, further removes the veil from--my in its very nature vivid enough picture of your fairly august state of lone Cambridge survivorship. I admired you on that state at closer quarters winter before last--even though my testimony to my so doing was at that time, from poor physical interferences, hampered and awkward; but History is so interesting when one is able to follow with closeness a particular attaching strain of it that my imagination, my intention, my affection and fidelity, hang and hover about your own particular noble exhibition of it as intelligently (yes, my dear Grace, as intelligently, nothing less, I insist) as you could possibly desire or put up with! Your letter fills in again for me a passage or two of detail--so that I feel myself the more possessed and qualified.... What I mean is above all that even this imperfect snatch of talk with you is dear and blest to me, and that if by hook or by crook, and through whatever densities of medium and distance, I draw out a little the sense of relation with you, it will have been better than utter frustration. I look out here, while I thus communicate, from a bit of the old-time stretch of riverside Chelsea, my first far-away glimpse or sense of which has, like so many of my first London glimpses and senses (my very first of all, I mean,) a never-lost association with you and yours, or at least with yours and thereby with you: which means my having come here first of all, one day of the early spring of 1869, with Charles and Susan, they having in their kindness brought me to call with them on the great (_if_ great!) and strange and more or less sinister D. G. Rossetti, whom Charles was in good relation with, difficult as that appeared already then to have become for most people, and my impression of whom on the occasion, with everything else of it, I have always closely retained. Part of it was just this impression of the really interesting and delightful old Thames-side Chelsea, over the admirable water-view of which these windows now hang--quite as if I had then secretly vowed to myself that some window of mine some day should. The River is more pompously embanked (making an admirable walk all the way to Westminster, of the most salutary value to me when I can at the soberest of paces attempt it;) but the sense of it all goes back, as I say, to my fond participation in that prehistoric Queen's Gate Terrace Winter. However, I am drenching you with numbered pages--I ask no credit for the number!--and I almost sit with you while you read them; not exactly watching for a glow of rapture on your face, but still, on the whole, seeing you take them, without a frown, for a good intention and a stopgap for something better. You tell me almost nothing of yourself, but all my sympathy and fidelity wait on you (sympathy always _can_ come in somewhere!) and I am yours, my dear Grace, always all faithfully,