ile that
of course we could not write to you till you had written to us! Else how
several times I could have written! could have sent you some Lines of
Hafiz or Jami or Nizami that I thought wanted Comment of some kind: so as
the Atlantic should have been no greater Bar between us than the two
hours rail to Oxford. And now I have forgot many things, or have left
the Books scattered in divers places; or, if I had all here, 'twould be
too much to send. So I must e'en take up with what the present Hour
turns up.

It was only yesterday I heard from your Brother of a Letter from you,
telling of your safe Arrival; of the Dark Faces about you at your
Calcutta Caravanserai! Methinks how I should like to be there! Perhaps
should not, though, were the Journey only half its length! Write to me
one day. . . .

I have now been five weeks alone at my old Lodgings in London where you
came this time last year! My wife in Norfolk. She came up yesterday;
and we have taken Lodgings for two months in the Regent's Park. And I
positively stay behind here in the old Place on purpose to write to you
in the same condition you knew me in and I you! I believe there are new
Channels fretted in my Cheeks with many unmanly Tears since then,
'remembering the Days that are no more,' in which you two are so mixt up.
Well, well; I have no news to tell you. Public Matters you know I don't
meddle with; and I have seen scarce any Friends even while in London
here. Carlyle but once; Thackeray not once; Spedding and Donne pretty
often. Spedding's first volume of Bacon is out; some seven hundred
pages; and the Reviews already begin to think it over-commentaried. How
interested would you be in it! and from you I should get a good Judgment,
which perhaps I can't make for myself. I hear Tennyson goes on with King
Arthur; but I have not seen or heard from him for a long long while.

Oddly enough, as I finished the last sentence, Thackeray was announced;
he came in looking gray, grand, and good-humoured; and I held up this
Letter and told him whom it was written to and he sends his Love! He
goes Lecturing all over England; has fifty pounds for each Lecture: and
says he is ashamed of the Fortune he is making. But he deserves it.

And now for my poor Studies. I have read really very little except
Persian since you went: and yet, from want of Eyes, not very much of
that. I have gone carefully over two-thirds of Hafiz again with
Dictionary and V