Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 2d Aug. 1871.
I always say that those people are the happiest who have a peremptory reason for staying in one place rather than another. Else I should be sorry for you that you are kept in London—by Parliamentary business, of course.
There is sunshine over our fields now, but the thermometer is only 64° in the house, and in the warmest part of the day I, having a talent for being cold, sit shivering, sometimes even with a warm-water bottle at my feet. I wonder if you went to the French plays to see the supreme Got? That is a refined pleasure which I enjoyed so much in Paris a few years ago that I was sorry to be out of reach of it this spring.
About the Crystal Palace music I remember feeling just what you mention—the sublime effect of the Handel choruses, and the total futility of the solos.
Letter to Mrs. Bray, 3d Aug. 1871.
Thanks for your little picture of things. Eminently acceptable in place of vague conjectures. I am a bitter enemy to make-believe about the human lot, but I think there is a true alleviation of distress in thinking of the intense enjoyment which accompanies a spontaneous, confident, intellectual activity. This may not be a counterpoise to the existing evils, but it is at least a share of mortal good, and good of an exquisite kind.
Are you not happy in the long-wished-for sunshine? I have a pretty lawn before me, with hills in the background. The train rushes by every now and then to make one more glad of the usual silence.
A good man writes to me from Scotland this morning, asking me if he is not right in pronouncing Romŏla, in defiance of the world around him (not a large world, I hope) who will say Romōla. Such is correspondence in these days; so that quantity is magnificent en gros but shabby en détail—i.e., in single letters like this.
Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 14th Aug. 1871.
We shall stay here only till the end of this month—at least, I have no hope that our propriétaires will be induced to protract their absence; and if the lingering smell of paint does not drive us away from the Priory again, we expect to stay there from the first of September, without projects of travel for many, many months.