I am sorry for poor Miss Brown, and for your not having known the Doctor. He should have come here when I told him. I believe he would have been alive yet, and I never should have been ill.
I believe you know more Latin than I do, and can certainly make more delightful use of it.
Your mornings' ministry to the birds must be remembered for you by the angels who paint their feathers. They will all, one day, be birds of Paradise, and say, when the adverse angel accuses you of being naughty to some people, "But we were hungry and she gave us corn, and took care that nobody else ate it."
I am indeed thankful you are better. But you must please tell me what the thing was I said which gave you so much pain. Do you recollect also what the little bit in "Proserpina" was that said so much to you? Were you not thinking of "Fors"?
I am very thankful for all your dear letters always—greatly delighted above all with the squirrel one, and Chaucer. Didn't he love squirrels! [39] and don't I wish I was a squirrel in Susie's pear trees, instead of a hobbling disconsolate old man, with no teeth to bite, much less crack, anything, and particularly forbidden to eat nuts!
Your precious letter, showing me you are a little better, came this morning, with the exquisite feathers, one, darker and lovelier than any I have seen, but please, I still want one not in the least flattened; all these have lost just the least bit of their shell-like bending. You can so easily devise a little padding to keep two strong cards or bits of wood separate for one or two to lie happily in. I don't mind giving you this tease, for the throat will be better the less you remember it. But for all of us, a dark sky is assuredly a poisonous and depressing power, which neither surgery nor medicine can resist. The difference to me between nature as she is now, and as she was ten years ago, is as great as between Lapland and Italy, and the total loss of comfort in morning and evening sky, the most difficult to resist of all spiritual hostility.