February 1907.—;Unhappy ones! Take care of your everlasting souls! I have got my soul bruised black and blue, beside some still ridging scars, in removals.
Yet there was once a transportation that was a triumph. It was suggested we should be drawn by pards to Richmond in a golden chariot. The pards was a detail not carried out; but of Thee, O Bacchus, and of Thy ritual, the open landau piled high with Chow and Field and Michael, doves and manuscripts and sacred plants!—;all that is US was there; and we drove consciously to Paradise.
There are delightful letters about the Rothenstein children, in particular of an unfortunate catastrophe to a parcel of birds’ eggs sent to a certain small John in January 1907:
Leaving home on Monday in great haste, I besought Cook to pack the tiny gift to John, and to blow the eggs. This may have been ill done, I fear. Poets are the right folk for packing....
My heart goes out to your son. It is so odd—;in a play we are writing there is half a page of Herod Agrippa (the highly revered slaughterer of the innocents, though that’s ‘another story’). He talks exactly like John—;and the FUTURE will say I copied him!...
Two days later.—;Furious am I over the smashed eggs. But what can we hope? It is the office of a cook to smash eggs. More eggs will be born, and John shall have some whole.
January 20th, 1907.—;Say to John—;if Nelson had promised a postcard to a lady, he would not have kept her waiting. He would have gone forth, in the snow, with guns being fired at him all round, and a lion growling in front, to choose that postcard. Say, I am quite sure of this.
In the spring of 1908 the poets went on one of their frequent country visits, which were often rather in the nature of a retreat, and this time they put up at an inn called the Tumble-Down-Dick. Thence they wrote:
You must some day visit us here, in our bar-parlour. The masons have been having a grand dinner next door—;smoke and excellent knife-and-fork laughter, discussion, the pleasure of all speaking at once—;how these things enchant the poets from their muttered breviaries!
And a few days later: