Well, now I must look around me and consider what there is to tell you. But I have been uneasy in various ways, sometimes by reason and sometimes by fantasy; and even now, although my dear old friend Dr. Scully is something better, he lies, I fear, in a very precarious state, while dearest Miss Mitford's letters from the deathbed of her father make my heart ache as surely almost as the post comes. There is nothing more various in character, nothing which distinguishes one human being from another more strikingly, than the expression of feeling, the manner in which it influences the outward man. If I were in her circumstances, I should sit paralysed—it would be impossible to me to write or to cry. And she, who loves and feels with the intensity of a nature warm in everything, seems to turn to sympathy by the very instinct of grief, and sits at the deathbed of her last relative, writing there, in letter after letter, every symptom, physical or moral—even to the very words of the raving of a delirium, and those, heart-breaking words! I could not write such letters; but I know she feels as deeply as any mourner in the world can. And all this reminds me of what you once asked me about the inscriptions in Lord Brougham's villa at Nice. There are probably as many different dialects for the heart as for the tongue, are there not?...

And now you will kindly like to have a word said about myself, and it need not be otherwise than a word to give your kindness pleasure. The long splendid summer, exhausting as the heat was to me sometimes, did me essential good, and left me walking about the room and equal to going downstairs (which I achieved four or five times), and even to going out in the chair, without suffering afterwards. And, best of all, the spitting of blood (I must tell you), which more or less kept by me continually, stopped quite some six weeks ago, and I have thus more reasonable hopes of being really and essentially better than I could have with such a symptom loitering behind accidental improvements. Weak enough, and with a sort of pulse which is not excellent, I certainly remain; but still, if I escape any decided attack this winter—and I am in garrison now—there are expectations of further good for next summer, and I may recover some moderate degree of health and strength again, and be able to do good instead of receiving it only.

I write under the eyes of Wordsworth. Not Wordsworth's living eyes, although the actual living poet had the infinite kindness to ask Mr. Kenyon twice last summer when he was in London, if he might not come to see me. Mr. Kenyon said 'No'—I couldn't have said 'No' to Wordsworth, though I had never gone to sleep again afterwards. But this Wordsworth who looks on me now is Wordsworth in a picture. Mr. Haydon the artist, with the utmost kindness, has sent me the portrait he was painting of the great poet—an unfinished portrait—and I am to keep it until he wants to finish it. Such a head! such majesty! and the poet stands musing upon Helvellyn! And all that—poet, Helvellyn, and all—is in my room![[69]]

Give my kind love to Mr. Martin—our kind love, indeed, to both of you—and believe me, my dearest Mrs. Martin,

Your ever affectionate BA.

Is there any hope for us of you before the winter ends? Do consider.

To H.S. Boyd

Monday, October 31, 1842.

My very dear Friend,—I have put off from day to day sending you these volumes, and in the meantime I have had a letter from the great poet! Did Arabel tell you that my sonnet on the picture was sent to Mr. Haydon, and that Mr. Haydon sent it to Mr. Wordsworth? The result was that Mr. Wordsworth wrote to me. King John's barons were never better pleased with their Charta than I am with this letter.[[70]]

But I won't tell you any more about it until you have read the poems which I send you. Read first, to put you into good humour, the sonnet written on Westminster Bridge, vol. iii. page 78. Then take from the sixth volume, page 152, the passage beginning 'Within the soul' down to page 153 at 'despair,' and again at page 155 beginning with