What a long interval, and what a very little has happened! The holidays were enlivened by two deaths in the village, which much excited Mamma, and one or two scandals in the neighbourhood, which she followed carefully without taking up sides.
The bulldog died, which was very sad; he was such a dear old thing. Mamma was very much upset about that too, in her funny way. She seems to spend more and more time in the village now, and to see less and less people. One comes back here looking forward to the fullness of the place.
We came back yesterday, and I feel absolutely lost without B. G. and Seymour, who have both left. They do make a gap, for we three understood each other, and we ladled out sympathy to each other when life became too black. And now I am alone, in a hornets’ nest of rabid footballers.
At the moment I am reading Gogol’s Dead Souls. His word-pictures are superb: better than Ruskin’s or Carlyle’s, and his style is so terse and clean-cut, at least it is in the translation, but it shines through that. I am an absolute slave. I shall keep this book for ever by me if I have enough cash to buy it with. He is wonderful.
He is at his best, I think, in description; I have met nothing like it. Almost he ousts Carlyle; not quite, though. He is a poet through and through.
29 January.
But surely this is most beautiful:
The trills of a lark fall drop by drop down an unseen aery ladder, and the calls of the cranes, floating by in a long string, like the ringing notes of silver bugles, resound in the void of melodiously vibrating ether.
He is a poet: and his book is in very truth a poem. It is Gogol.
30 January.