ught of Malebranche hooking the miserable souls that tried to
escape back again into the boiling pitch. But we got away and safe
home, and leave Exeter to-morrow.

EXETER, July 31, 1831.
DEAREST H----,

I am content to be whatever does not militate against your
affection for me.... I had a long letter from dear A----, a day
ago, from Weybridge. She is quite well, and says my mother is as
happy as the day is long, now she is once more in her beloved
haunts. I love Weybridge too very much.... It seems to me that
memory is the special organ of pain, for even when it recalls our
pleasures, it recalls only the past, and half their sweetness
becomes bitter in the process. I have a tenacious and acute memory,
and, as the phrenologists affirm, no hope, and feel disposed to
lament that, not having both, I have either. The one seems the
necessary counterpoise of the other; the one is the source of most
of the pain, as the other is of most of the pleasure, which we
derive from the things that are not; and I feel daily more and more
my deficiency in the more cheerful attribute....

You have been to the Opera, and seen what even one's imagination
does not shrug its shoulders at; I mean Madame Pasta. I admire her
perfectly, and she seems to me perfect. How I wish I had been with
you! And yet I cannot fancy you in the Opera House; it is a sort of
atmosphere that I find it difficult to think of your breathing....
I wish you had not asked me to write verses for you upon that
picture of Haydon's "Bonaparte at St. Helena." Of course, I know it
familiarly through the engraving, and, in spite of its sunshine,
what a shudder and chill it sends to one's heart! It is very
striking, but I have neither the strength nor concentrativeness
requisite for writing upon it. The simplicity of its effect is what
makes it so fine; and any poetry written upon it would probably
fail to be as simple, and therefore as powerful, as itself. I
cannot even promise you to attempt it, but if ever I fall in with a
suitable frame of mind for so bold an experiment, I will remember
you and the rocks of St. Helena. "My lady" (an Italian portrait on
which I had written some verses) "Mia Donna," or "Madonna," more
properly to speak, was a most beaut