The country is singularly destitute of gentlemen’s houses, and has a solitary unoccupied appearance, with its wide fields and its field-roads. A railway, however, with a single line of rails, and, I believe, three trains a day, looking quite afraid of what it is doing, runs up through them from Rugby to Stamford.
To ——
London: May 24.
The flowers are a great deal too beautiful for me, and I a great deal too unbeautiful for them. However, here they are now standing in my unartificial arrangement, glorifying this unfortunate apartment. I have not failed to find out the scarlet azalea. I have put it in a wine-glass with the lily, which, after all, is my chief friend.
How beautiful the falling leaves of flowers are! not decayed, not even as yet decaying, but ripe, full to their fullest of growth and adolescence. I cannot prevail upon myself to empty the wine-glass, the surface of whose water is covered with fallen geranium petals, though there are still buds enough opening and opened to make a fair show. The kalmias still survive; they will perhaps last till Thursday—sufficiently, at least, to satisfy the eyes of a lover of falling petals.
People should not be very sceptical about things in general. ‘Wen Gott betrügt, ist wohl betrogen.’ There are plenty of good things in the world, and good persons. Fitness is a great deal, but truth is a great deal more. If things are good, we ought to accept them as such; looking at them, and not thinking of our own fitness.
To R. W. Emerson, Esq.
London: June 17, 1852.
My dear Emerson,—I hope a letter from me will not be a disagreeable visitor, though it is to be all about business, and that entirely my own business. The business is, that I entertain thoughts of emigrating to your side of the water. University Hall has not flourished; I have left it some months. I am at present merely Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, here, the stipend for which honourable position amounts to some 30l. a year. Meantime, like the rest of mankind, I wish to be married and am as good or bad as engaged. Is there any chance, do you think, of earning bread and water, if not bread and flesh, anywhere between the Atlantic and the Mississippi, by teaching Latin, Greek, or English?
I am half loath now, after nearly three years’ apprenticeship, to quit this great town. It is almost like beginning to go down from a high mountain top which it has taken long hours to get to. But I dare say it would be for the best.