May 19.—This month has been published a volume of my poems—"Legend of Jubal, and other Poems." On the 1st of June we go into the country to the cottage, Earlswood Common, for four months, and I hope there to get deep shafts sunk in my prose book. My health has been a wretched drag on me during this last half-year. I have lately written "a symposium."
Letter to Mrs. Cross, 14th June, 1874.
I have so much trust in your love for us that I feel sure you will like to know of our happiness in the secure peace of the country, and the good we already experience in soul and body from the sweet breezes over hill and common, the delicious silence, and the unbroken spaces of the day. Just now the chill east wind has brought a little check to our pleasure in our long afternoon drives; and I could wish that Canon Kingsley and his fellow-worshippers of that harsh divinity could have it reserved entirely for themselves as a tribal god.
We think the neighborhood so lovely that I must beg you to tell J. we are in danger of settling here unless he makes haste to find us a house in your "country-side"—a house with undeniable charms, on high ground, in a strictly rural neighborhood (water and gas laid on, nevertheless), to be vacant precisely this autumn!
My philosopher is writing away with double verve in a projecting window, where he can see a beautiful green slope crowned and studded with large trees. I, too, have an agreeable corner in another room. Our house has the essentials of comfort, and we have reason to be contented with it.
I confess that my chief motive for writing about ourselves is to earn some news of you, which will not be denied me by one or other of the dear pairs of hands always ready to do us a kindness.
Our Sunday is really a Sabbath now—a day of thorough peace. But I shall get hungry for a sight of some of the Sunday visitors before the end of September.
I include all your family in a spiritual embrace, and am always yours lovingly.
Letter to John Blackwood, 16th June, 1874.
We are revelling in the peace of the country, and have no drawback to our delight except the cold winds, which have forced us to put on winter clothing for the last four or five days.