sting to you. After all I come to chaos and
silence, and even old night--it is growing so dark. I live in London,
to be sure, and except for the glory of it I might live in a desert,
so profound is my solitude and so complete my isolation from things
and persons without. I lie all day, and day after day, on the sofa,
and my windows do not even look into the street. To abuse myself with
a vain deceit of rural life I have had ivy planted in a box, and it
has flourished and spread over one window, and strikes against the
glass with a little stroke from the thicker leaves when the wind blows
at all briskly. _Then_ I think of forests and groves; it is my triumph
when the leaves strike the window pane, and this is not a sound like
a lament. Books and thoughts and dreams (almost too consciously
_dreamed_, however, for me--the illusion of them has almost passed)
and domestic tenderness can and ought to leave nobody lamenting.
Also God's wisdom, deeply steeped in His love, _is_ as far as we can
stretch out our hands.

[Footnote 86: The lines 'To J.S.,' which begin:

'The wind that beats the mountain blows
More softly round the open wold.'

_To Mr. Westwood_
50 Wimpole Street: December 26, 1843.

Dear Mr. Westwood,--You think me, perhaps, and not without apparent
reason, ungrateful and insensible to your letter, but indeed I am
neither one nor the other, and I am writing now to try and prove it to
you. I was much touched by some tones of kindness in the letter, and
it was welcome altogether, and I did not need the 'owl' which came
after to waken me, because I was wide awake enough from the first
moment; and now I see that you have been telling your beads, while I
seemed to be telling nothing, in that dread silence of mine. May all
true saints of poetry be propitious to the wearer of the 'Rosary.'

In answer to a question which you put to me long ago on the subject
of books of theology, I will confess to you that, although I have read
rather widely the divinity of the Greek Fathers, Gregory, Chrysostom,
and so forth, and have of course informed myself in the works
generally of our old English divines, Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and so
forth, I am not by any means a frequent reader of books of theology as
such, and as the men of our times have made them. I have looked into
the 'Tracts' from curiosity and to hear what the world was talking
of, and I was disappointed _even_ in the degree of intellectual power
displayed in