,
Thursday evening.
You won't get this note to-morrow, I'm afraid, but after that I think they will be regular till I reach Oxford. It is very nice to know that there is some one who does care for a letter, as if she were one's sister. You would be glad to see the clouds break for me; and I had indeed a very lovely morning drive and still lovelier evening, and full moonrise here over the Lune.
I suppose it is Kirk-by-Lune's Dale? for the church, I find, is a very important Norman relic. By the way, I should tell you, that the colored plates in the "Stones of Venice" do great injustice to my drawings; the patches are worn on the stones. My drawings were not good, but the plates are total failures. The only one even of the engravings, which is rightly done is the (last, I think, in Appendix) inlaid dove and raven. I'll show you the drawing for that when I come back, and perhaps for the San Michele, if I recollect to fetch it from Oxford, and I'll fetch you the second volume, which has [Pg 86] really good plates. That blue beginning, I forgot to say, is of the Straits of Messina, and it is really very like the color of the sea.
That is intensely curious about the parasitical plant of Borneo. But—very dreadful!
You are like Timon of Athens, and I'm like one of his parasites. The oranges are delicious, the brown bread dainty; what the melon is going to be I have no imagination to tell. But, oh me, I had such a lovely letter from Dr. John, sent me from Joan this morning, and I've lost it. It said, "Is Susie as good as her letters? If so, she must be better. What freshness of enjoyment in everything she says!"
Alas! not in everything she feels in this weather, I fear. Was ever anything so awful?
Do you know, Susie, everything that has happened to me (and the leaf I sent you this morning may show you it has had some hurting in it) is little in comparison to the crushing and depressing effect on me, of what I learn day by day as I work on, of the cruelty and ghastliness of the nature I used to think so Divine? But, I get out of it by remembering, This is but a crumb of dust we call the "world," and a moment of eternity which we call "time." Can't answer the great question to-night.