‘My green and silent spot amid the hills,
Oh, ’tis a quiet spirit-healing nook.’[551]
I should not like to live in a bare or commonplace house, but then I don’t; and oh! the luxury of absolute independence. I should rather like a carriage and horse perhaps, but I don’t in the least want them. Certainly, in words I have been reading of Bishop Fraser, ‘living in comfort is a phrase entirely depending for its meaning on the ideas of him who uses it.’”
To Francis Cookson.
“Sept. 7.—Is it a sign of old age coming on, I wonder, when one has the distaste for leaving home by which I am now possessed? I simply hate it. When one has all one wants and exactly what one likes, why should one set off on a round of visits, in which one may, and probably will, have many pleasant hours, but as certainly many bare and dull ones, often in dreary rooms, sometimes with wooden-headed people, and without the possibility of the familiar associations which habit makes such a pleasure? Then, in most country-houses, ‘l’anglais s’amuse moult tristement,’ as Froissart says. I cannot say how delightful I always find my home life—the ever-fresh morning glories of the familiar view of brilliant flowers, green lawns, and oak woods; and then the sea, which to me is so much more beautiful in its morning whiteness with faint grey cloud-shadows, or smiling under the tremulous sun-rays,[552] than in the evening light, which brings a lovely but monotonous blueness with it: the joyous companionship of my little black spitz Nero (‘Black,’ not the wicked emperor): the regularity of my proof-sheet work, and other work, till luncheon-dinner, after which there are generally visitors to be attended to; and then quiet work again, or meditation on the long-ago and the future, when
‘Silent musings urge the mind to seek
Something too high for syllables to speak.’[553]
Then there is always my library, in which 6000 agreeable friends are always ready to converse with me at any moment, and ‘vingt-sept années d’ennui et de solitude lui firent lire bien des livres,’ as Catherine II. said in her epitaph on herself, might certainly be applied to me. Only I can imagine, if eyes and limbs failed, the winter evenings becoming long and monotonous. ‘Meglio solo che male accompagnato’ is a good Italian proverb, only it would be pleasant to be ‘ben accompagnato.’ I am beginning to feel with Madame de Staël—‘J’aime la solitude, mais il me faut à qui dire; j’aime la solitude.’
“The neighbours are very kindly beginning to consider me ‘the hermit of Holmhurst,’ and come to visit me in my cell, especially on Tuesdays, without expecting me to go to them. I would not have a bicycle on any account, for then I might be obliged to go, and I am too poor to have a carriage. So, in six weeks, I have only twice been outside the gates—for one day to London for George Jolliffe’s wedding, and for two nights to Battle, whence, to my great joy, the Duchess asked me to ‘mother’ her guests—charming Lady Edward Cavendish, the Vincent Corbets, and Mr. Armstrong, the Oxford history professor—to Hurstmonceaux. How beautiful, how interesting it all looked. No other place ever seems to me half so romantic; but though ‘at each step one treads on a memory,’ as Cicero says, I can go there now without a pang; my affections are too full of Holmhurst to have any room for it, and the old family are almost forgotten there already, ‘so much has happened since they left.’ ‘Lord! to see how the world makes nothing of a man, an houre after he is dead,’ writes Pepys in his Diary.
