e you all the better for your Englishman's humours. One
doesn't find such things in London; something more like it here in the
country, where every one, with whatever natural stock of intellect
endowed, at least grows up his own way, and flings his branches about
him, not stretched on the espalier of London dinner-table company.

P.S. Next morning. Snow over the ground. We have our wonders of
inundation in Suffolk also, I can tell you. For three weeks ago such
floods came, that an old woman was carried off as she was retiring from a
beer house about 9 p.m., and drowned. She was probably half seas over
before she left the beer house.

And three nights ago I looked out at about ten o'clock at night, before
going to bed. It seemed perfectly still; frosty, and the stars shining
bright. I heard a continuous moaning sound, which I knew to be, not that
of an infant exposed, or female ravished, but of the sea, more than ten
miles off! What little wind there was carried to us the murmurs of the
waves circulating round these coasts so far over a flat country. But
people here think that this sound so heard is not from the waves that
break, but a kind of prophetic voice from the body of the sea itself
announcing great gales. Sure enough we have got them, however heralded.
Now I say that all this shows that we in this Suffolk are not so
completely given over to prose and turnips as some would have us. I
always said that being near the sea, and being able to catch a glimpse of
it from the tops of hills, and of houses, redeemed Suffolk from dullness;
and at all events that our turnip fields, dull in themselves, were at
least set all round with an undeniably poetic element. And so I see
Arnold says; he enumerates five inland counties as the only parts of
England for which nothing could be said in praise. Not that I agree with
him there neither; I cannot allow the valley of the Ouse about which some
of my pleasantest recollections hang to be without its great charm. W.
Browne, whom you despised, is married, and I shall see but little of him
for the future. I have laid by my rod and line by the willows of the
Ouse for ever. 'He is married and cannot come.' This change is the true
meaning of those verses, {185}

Friend after friend departs;
Who has not lost a friend?

and so on. If I were conscious of being stedfast and good humoured
enough, I would marry to-morrow. But a humourist is best by himself.

_To B