Kindest love from all, and from me.
Ever affectionately.
Mr. William Charles Kent.
Tavistock House, Christmas Eve, 1856.
My dear Sir,
I cannot leave your letter unanswered, because I am really anxious that you should understand why I cannot comply with your request.
Scarcely a week passes without my receiving requests from various quarters to sit for likenesses, to be taken by all the processes ever invented. Apart from my having an invincible objection to the multiplication of my countenance in the shop-windows, I have not, between my avocations and my needful recreation, the time to comply with these proposals. At this moment there are three cases out of a vast number, in which I have said: "If I sit at all, it shall be to you first, to you second, and to you third." But I assure you, I consider myself almost as unlikely to go through these three conditional achievements as I am to go to China. Judge when I am likely to get to Mr. Watkins!
I highly esteem and thank you for your sympathy with my writings. I doubt if I have a more genial reader in the world.
Very faithfully yours.
PROLOGUE TO "THE LIGHTHOUSE."
(Spoken by Charles Dickens.)
Slow music all the time, unseen speaker, curtain down.
A story of those rocks where doomed ships come
To cast them wreck'd upon the steps of home,
Where solitary men, the long year through—
The wind their music and the brine their view—
Warn mariners to shun the beacon-light;
A story of those rocks is here to-night.
Eddystone lighthouse