“_Holmhurst, June 21, 1872._--I am feeling ungrateful for never having written since my happy fortnight with you came to a close, a time which I enjoyed more than I ever expected to enjoy anything again, and which made me feel there might still be something worth living on for, so much kindness and affection did I receive from so many. It is pleasant too to think of your comfortable home, which rises before me in a gallery of happy pictures, and I know it all so well now, from the parrot in Mrs. Jarvis’s room to the red geraniums in your window. I have had Mrs. and Miss Kuper here, and now I am alone, no voice but that of the guinea-fowls shrieking ‘Come back’ in the garden. I miss all my London friends very much, but suppose one would not enjoy it if it went on always, and certainly solitude is the time for work: I did eleven hours of it yesterday. As regards my books, I feel more and more with Arnold that a man is only fit to teach as long as he is himself learning daily.”
“_Holmhurst, June 25._--‘Poor Aunt Sophy’ would not have thought she had done nothing to cheer me, could she have seen the interest with which I read her letter and returned to it over and over again. Such a letter is quite delightful, and here has the effect of one reaching Robinson Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, so complete is the silence and solitude when no one is staying here.
‘The flowers my guests, the birds my pensioners, Books my companions, and but few beside.’[18]
“How I delight in knowing all that the delightful human beings are about, of whom I think now as living in another hemisphere. I should like to see more of people--perhaps another year I may not be so busy: that is, I long for the cream which I enjoyed with you, but I should not care for the milk and water of a country neighbourhood. If one has too much people-seeing, however, even of the London best, one feels that it is ‘a withering world,’[19] and that if--
‘The world is too much with us, late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’[20]
“I have been made very ill-tempered all day because Murray, during my absence in Spain, has published a second edition of my Oxfordshire Handbook, _greatly_ altered, without consulting me, and it seems to me utterly spoilt and vulgarised. He is obliged by his contract to give me £40, but I would a great deal rather have seen the book uninjured and received nothing.”