to see your seal
upon a letter once more; and although the letter itself left me with
a mournful impression of your having passed some time so much less
happily than I would wish and pray for you, yet there remains the
pleasant thought to me still that you have not altogether forgotten
me. Do receive the expression of my most affectionate sympathy under
this and every circumstance--and I fear that the shock to your nerves
and spirits could not be a light one, however impressed you might be
and must be with the surety and verity of God's love working in all
His will. Poor poor Patience! Coming to be so happy with you, with
that joyous smile I thought so pretty! Do you not remember my telling
you so? Well--it is well and better for her; happier for her, if God
in Christ Jesus have received her, than her hopes were of the holiday
time with you. The holiday is _for ever_ now....

I heard from Nelly Bordman only a few days before receiving your
letter, and so far from preparing me for all this sadness and
gloom, she pleased me with her account of you whom she had lately
seen--dwelling upon your retrograde passage into youth, and the
delight you were taking in the presence and society of some still
more youthful, fair, and gay _monstrum amandum_, some prodigy of
intellectual accomplishment, some little Circe who never turned
anybodies into pigs. I learnt too from her for the first time that you
were settled at Hampstead! Whereabout at Hampstead, and for how long?
She didn't tell me _that_, thinking of course that I knew something
more about you than I do. Yes indeed; you _do_ treat me very shabbily.
I agree with you in thinking so. To think that so many hills and woods
should interpose between us--that I should be lying here, fast bound
by a spell, a sleeping beauty in a forest, and that _you_, who used
to be such a doughty knight, should not take the trouble of cutting
through even a hazel tree with your good sword, to find out what
had become of me. Now do tell me, the hazel tree being down at last,
whether you mean to live at Hampstead, whether you have taken a
house there and have carried your books there, and wear Hampstead
grasshoppers in your bonnet (as they did at Athens) to prove yourself
of the soil.

All this nonsense will make you think I am better, and indeed I am
pretty well just now--quite, however, confined to the bed--except when
lifted from it to the sofa baby-wise while they make it; even then
apt to fa