To his Sister.
Oriel: April 18, 1848.
I am glad you liked the Blumen-Frucht-und-Dorn-Stücke. If there is any fault in Richter, it is perhaps that he is too sentimental; but it is a great comfort to get a little taste of that sweetmeat now and then; and in him you have it always not in its merely luscious form, but tempered with agreeable acids and delicate laurel-leaf bitters.
Up here at Oxford I keep in general company very quiet; insomuch that I heard yesterday that people not unfrequently take me for some little time after introduction to be no less than a Puseyite; but at the same time, I could sometimes be provoked to send out a flood of lava boiling hot amidst their flowery ecclesiastical fields and parterres. Very likely living in this state of suppressed volcanic action makes one more exasperated than one should be when any sort of a crater presents itself. Natheless, there is wisdom in withholding.
Tell mother not to finish all her furnishings, and get ‘everything handsome about her’ before I come home, which will be about the 1st of May, for then I shall be able to stay if I please for three weeks or more, as my tutorship will be in the hands of another.
To the same.
Paris: Thursday, May 11, 1848.
The only events since I wrote on Tuesday have been my visit to the Théâtre de la République to see Rachel in ‘Phèdre,’ and the arrival of Emerson. With the former I was a little disappointed, but I am going again to study the thing. I have been to see the Jardin des Plantes, and the column erected to the honour of the revolution of July 1830, on the site of the Bastille. It was here that the Republic was solemnly inaugurated in February, and here I think it was they burnt the throne.
George Sand’s newspaper, the ‘Vraie République,’ disapproves of the new Provisional Government (Arago, Marie, Garnier-Pagès, Lamartine, and Ledru-Rollin) altogether, though privately she is friendly with and indeed attached to Lamartine.
People are coming up from the country to the great national fête of Sunday next, and of course they all want to go to hear the debates. The weather is splendid; the sun glorifies us by day, the moon by night.