dust, and
soul-secrets to humanity--there are natural heirs to all these things.
Not that I do not intimately understand the shrinking back from the
idea of publicity on any terms--not that I would not myself destroy
papers of mine which were sacred to _me_ for personal reasons--but
then I never would call this natural weakness, virtue--nor would I, as
a teacher of the public, announce it and attempt to justify it as an
example to other minds and acts, I hope.

How hard you are on the mending of stockings and the rest of it! Why
not agree with me and like that sort of homeliness and simplicity in
combination with such large faculty as we must admit _there_? Lord
Bacon did a great deal of trifling besides the stuffing of the fowl
you mention--which I did not remember: and in fact, all the great work
done in the world, is done just by the people who know how to
trifle--do you not think so? When a man makes a principle of 'never
losing a moment,' he is a lost man. Great men are eager to find an
hour, and not to avoid losing a moment. 'What are you doing' said
somebody once (as I heard the tradition) to the beautiful Lady Oxford
as she sate in her open carriage on the race-ground--'Only a little
algebra,' said she. People who do a little algebra on the race-ground
are not likely to do much of anything with ever so many hours for
meditation. Why, you must agree with me in all this, so I shall not be
sententious any longer. Mending stockings is not exactly the sort of
pastime _I_ should choose--who do things quite as trifling without the
utility--and even your Seigneurie peradventure.... I stop there for
fear of growing impertinent. The _argumentum ad hominem_ is apt to
bring down the _argumentum ad baculum_, it is as well to remember in
time.

For Wordsworth ... you are right in a measure and by a standard--but I
have heard such really desecrating things of him, of his selfishness,
his love of money, his worldly _cunning_ (rather than prudence) that I
felt a relief and gladness in the new chronicle;--and you can
understand how _that_ was. Miss Mitford's doctrine is that everything
put into the poetry, is taken out of the man and lost utterly by him.
Her general doctrine about poets, quite amounts to that--I do not say
it too strongly. And knowing that such opinions are held by minds not
feeble, it is very painful (as it would be indeed in any case) to see
them apparently justified by royal poets like Wordsworth. Ah, but I