s.

God bless you, my dear. Love to dear Dorothy.

Ever as ever yours,
FANNY.

WORCESTER, Tuesday, 17th.
MY DEAREST HAL,

Those pretty French lines I sent you are by Victor Hugo, a man of great
genius, but almost the most exaggerated writer of the exaggerated modern
school of French style. Some of his poems, in spite of this, are fine
and charming; and, indeed, there is not much better French to be found
than the prose of some of the French writers of novels and essays.
Madame George Sand, Merimee, Ste. Beuve, write with admirable simplicity
and force.

I sent my young adorer back, in return for her quatrain, Millevoye's
lines on the withered leaf--a far more appropriate image of my
peregrinations. These, no doubt, you know, ending with four pretty
lines--

"Je vais ou va toute chose,
Sans me plaindre, ou m'inquieter
Ou va la feuille de rose,
Et la feuille de laurier."

... You ask after my audiences. At Bath the same singular-looking
gentleman, who is beautiful as well as singular looking, and wonderfully
like my uncle John, came and sat at my last morning reading in the same
conspicuous place. He is a helpless invalid, and was wheeled in his
chair through my private room, to the place which he occupied near my
reading-stage. His name is C----, and he and his wife were intimate
friends of John Kemble's, and sent to beg I would see them after the
reading. As I had to start immediately for Cheltenham, this was
impossible, which I was very sorry for, as I should like to have spoken
to that beautiful face.

You impress upon me the value of the blessing of health, and I think I
estimate it duly; for although I said it mattered little how I was, I
meant that, isolated as I am, my ill health would affect and afflict
fewer persons than that of some one who had bonds and ties of one sort
and another.... My work goes on without interruption, and I think with
little variation in my mode of performing it; and I make efforts of this
kind, sometimes under such circumstances of physical suffering and
weakness, that I am almost hard-heartedly incredulous about the
difficulty of doing _anything_ that one _has to do_--which is not very
reasonable either, for the force of will, the nervous energy, which
carries one through such efforts, depends itself on physical cond