I'm horribly sulky this morning, for I expected to have a room with a view, if the room was ever so little, and I've got a great big one looking into the Castle yard, and I feel exactly as if I was in a big modern county jail with beautiful turrets of modern Gothic.
I came to see Prince Leopold, who has been a prisoner to his sofa lately, but I trust he is better; he is very bright and gentle, under severe and almost continual pain. My dear little Susie, about that rheumatism of yours? If it wasn't for that, how happy we both ought to be, living in Thwaites and woods, instead of nasty castles! Well, about that Shakespeare guide? I cannot, cannot, at all fancy what it is. In and out among the stars; it sounds like a plan for stringing the stars. I am so very glad you told me of it.
"Unwritten books in my brain?" Yes, but also in how many other brains of quiet people, books unthought of, "In the Book and Volume" which will be read some day in Heaven, aloud, "When saw we thee?" Yes, and "When read we ourselves?"
My dear Susie, if I were to think really lost, what you for instance have new found in your own powers of receiving and giving pleasure, the beautiful faculties you have, scarcely venturing even to show the consciousness of them, when it awakes in you, what a woeful conception I should have of God's not caring for us. He will gather all the wheat into His garner.
Ingleton
,
17th January
(1878).
It's a charming post here, and brings me my letters the first thing in the morning; and I took care to tell nobody where I was going, except people I wanted to hear from. What a little busy bee of a Susie you've been to get all those extracts ready by this time. I've got nothing [Pg 35] done all the while I've been away, but a few mathematical figures, and the less I do the less I find I can do it; and yesterday, for the first time these twenty years at least, I hadn't so much as a "plan" in my head all day. But I had a lot to look at in the moorland flowers and quiet little ancient Yorkshire farmhouses, not to speak of Ingleborough, who was, I think, a little depressed because he knew you were only going to send your remembrances and not your love to him. The clouds gathered on his brow occasionally in a fretful manner, but towards evening he resumed his peace of mind and sends you his "remembrances" and his "blessing." I believe he saves both you and me from a great deal of east wind.