the grave
With solemn grace

A poet, a friend, a generous man Mr. Horne is, even if no laureate for
the fairies.

I have this moment a parcel of books via Mr. Moxon--Miss Martineau's
two volumes--and Mr. Bailey sends his 'Festus,' very kindly, ... and
'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' from America from a Mrs. or a Miss
Fuller--how I hate those 'Women of England,' 'Women and their Mission'
and the rest. As if any possible good were to be done by such
expositions of rights and wrongs.

Your letter would be worth them all, if _you_ were less _you_! I mean,
just this letter, ... all alive as it is with crawling buzzing
wriggling cold-blooded warm-blooded creatures ... as all alive as your
own pedant's book in the tree. And do you know, I think I like frogs
too--particularly the very little leaping frogs, which are so
high-hearted as to emulate the birds. I remember being scolded by my
nurses for taking them up in my hands and letting them leap from one
hand to the other. But for the toad!--why, at the end of the row of
narrow beds which we called our gardens when we were children, grew an
old thorn, and in the hollow of the root of the thorn, lived a toad, a
great ancient toad, whom I, for one, never dared approach too nearly.
That he 'wore a jewel in his head' I doubted nothing at all. You must
see it glitter if you stooped and looked steadily into the hole. And
on days when he came out and sate swelling his black sides, I never
looked steadily; I would run a hundred yards round through the shrubs,
deeper than knee-deep in the long wet grass and nettles, rather than
go past him where he sate; being steadily of opinion, in the
profundity of my natural history-learning, that if he took it into his
toad's head to spit at me I should drop down dead in a moment,
poisoned as by one of the Medici.

Oh--and I had a field-mouse for a pet once, and should have joined my
sisters in a rat's nest if I had not been ill at the time (as it was,
the little rats were tenderly smothered by over-love!): and
blue-bottle flies I used to feed, and hated your spiders for them; yet
no, not much. My aversion proper ... call it horror rather ... was for
the silent, cold, clinging, gliding _bat_; and even now, I think, I
could not sleep in the room with that strange bird-mouse-creature, as
it glides round the ceiling silently, silently as its shadow does on
the floor. If you listen or look, there is not a wave of the wing--the