le" (a
very charming book) has given me a fresh love of spring. Constable loved
it above all seasons: he hated autumn. When Sir G. Beaumont, who was of
the old classical taste, asked him if he did not find it difficult to
place _his brown tree_ in his pictures, "Not at all," said C, "I never
put one in at all." And when Sir George was crying up the tone of the
old masters' landscapes, and quoting an _old violin_ as the proper tone
of colour for a picture, Constable got up, took an old Cremona, and laid
it down on the sunshiny grass. You would like the book. In defiance of
all this, I have hung my room with pictures, like very old fiddles
indeed; but I agree with Sir George and Constable both. I like pictures
that are not like nature. I can have nature better than any picture by
looking out of my window. Yet I respect the man who tries to paint up to
the freshness of earth and sky. Constable did not wholly achieve what he
tried at: and perhaps the old masters chose a soberer scale of things
as more within the compass of lead paint. To paint dew with lead!...

* * * * *

It is now the 8th of December; it has blown a most desperate east wind,
all razors; a wind like one of those knives one sees at shops in London,
with 365 blades all drawn and pointed. The wheat is all sown; the
fallows cannot be ploughed. What are all the poor folks to do during the
winter? And they persist in having the same enormous families they used
to do; a woman came to me two days ago who had seventeen children! What
farmers are to employ all these? What landlord can find room for them?
The law of Generation must be repealed....

DEAR CARLYLE,
[Sidenote: _Edward FitzGerald_]

I should sometimes write to you if I had anything worth telling, or
worth putting you to the trouble of answering me. About twice in a year,
however, I do not mind asking you one thing which is easily answered,
how you and Mrs. Carlyle are? And yet, perhaps, it is not so easy for
you to tell me so much about yourself: for your "well-being" comprises a
good deal! That you are not carried off by the cholera I take for
granted, since else I should have seen in the papers some controversy
with Doctor Wordsworth as to whether you were to be buried in
Westminster Abbey, by the side of Wilberforce perhaps! Besides, a short
note from Thackeray a few weeks ago told me you had been to see him. I
conclude also from this that you have not been a summer