I am not inclined to let you rest any longer without asking you to send me some account of yourself, for it is long since I got my last news from Edinburgh. I should like to know that you have continued to gather strength, and that you have all been consequently more and more enjoying your life at Strathtyrum. It is an ugly theory that happiness wants the contrast of illness and anxiety, but I know that Mrs. Blackwood must have a new comfort in seeing you once more with your usual strength.
We have had "a bad time" in point of health, and it is only quite lately that we have both been feeling a little better. The fault is all in our own frames, not in our air or other circumstances; for we like our house and neighborhood better and better. The general testimony and all other arguments are in favor of this district being thoroughly healthy. But we both look very haggard in the midst of our blessings.
Are you not disturbed by yesterday's Indian news? One's hopes for the world's getting a little rest from war are continually checked. Every day, after reading the Times, I feel as if all one's writing were miserably trivial stuff in the presence of this daily history. Do you think there are persons who admire Russia's "mission" in Asia as they did the mission in Europe?
Please write me anything that comes easily to the end of your pen, and make your world seem nearer to me. Good Mr. Simpson, I hope, lets you know that he is prospering in his pursuit of pleasure without work—which seems a strange paradox in association with my idea of him.
Letter to Madame Bodichon, 15th Oct. 1878.
The days pass by without my finding time to tell you what I want to tell you—how delighted I was to have a good account of you. But every bright day, and we have had many such, has made me think the more of you, and hope that you were drawing in strength from the clear, sweet air. I miss so much the hope that I used always to have of seeing you in London and talking over everything just as we used to do—in the way that will never exactly come with any one else. How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends! The new are comparatively foreigners, with whom one's talk is hemmed in by mutual ignorance. The one cannot express, the other cannot divine.
We are intensely happy in our bit of country, as happy as the cloudy aspect of public affairs will allow any one who cares for them to be, with the daily reading of the Times.
A neighbor of ours was reciting to me yesterday some delicious bits of dialogue with a quaint Surrey woman; e.g., "O ma'am, what I have gone through with my husband! He is so uneddicated—he never had a tail-coat in his life!"
Letter to John Blackwood, 23d Nov. 1878, from the Priory.
When Mr. Lewes sent you my MS.[34] the other morning he was in that state of exhilarated activity which often comes with the sense of ease after an attack of illness which had been very painful. In the afternoon he imprudently drove out, and undertook, with his usual eagerness, to get through numerous details of business, over-fatigued himself, and took cold. The effect has been a sad amount of suffering from feverishness and headache, and I have been in deep anxiety, am still very unhappy, and only comforted by Sir James Paget's assurances that the actual trouble will be soon allayed.