The lines from Nonnus are very beautiful. It is always a pleasure to me to get from you such stray leaves from gardens I shall never enter.
I have been doing some of the dialogue, [211b] which seems the easiest thing in the world to do but is
not. It is not easy to keep to good dialectic, and yet keep up the disjected sway of natural conversation. I talk, you see, as if I were to do some good thing: but I don’t mean that. But any such trials of one’s own show one the art of such dialogues as Plato’s, where the process is so logical and conversational at once: and the result so plain, and seemingly so easy. They remain the miracles of that Art to this day: and will do for many a day: for I don’t believe they will ever be surpassed; certainly not by Landor.
Yours ever,
E. F. G.
[Postmark Woodbridge, Jan. 13, 1847.]
Dear Cowell,
I am always delighted to see you whenever you can come, and Friday will do perfectly well for me. But do not feel bound to come if it snow, etc. In other respects I have small compunction, for I think it must do you good to go out, even to such a desert as this.
I have not got Phidippus into any presentible shape: and indeed have not meddled with him lately: as the spirit of light dialogue evaporated from me under an influenza, and I have not courted it back yet. Luckily I and the world can very well afford to wait for its return. I began Thucydides two days ago! and read (after your example) a very little every day, i.e. have done so for two days. Your
Sanscrit sentences are very fine. It is good for you to go on with that. We hear Mr. Nottidge [213] is dying: who can be sorry for him!