TO RICHARD TRENCH, ESQ.
Bath, April 16, 1815.
You have no notion how much I enjoy my escape from the jaws of the hill—opening, just as if they designed to close on us again. I must never put myself dans la gorge des montagnes. With a thousand reasons for being in worse, I am in better spirits, and enjoy my loftiness and my airiness. In short, I hate to look up, except to people, and that is a pleasure I am used to, and have been particularly so during the last twelve years.
I was at Mr. Lemon’s last night, and was mistaken and talked to for Mrs. J. Hayes, which, as she is but four-and-twenty, I accepted for a great compliment. I personated her as long as I could, not to distress the speaker; but when, after inquiring for all Mrs. Hayes’ near friends and relations, she came to solicitude for our friend Mrs. Wiggins, I could not hold out or do the honours of four-and-twenty any longer. I returned Mrs. ——’s visit at her cottage on Saturday. It is one of those cottages described in a novel, where one finds a pair of runaway lovers or a fair unknown. The flame of friendship on her part burned and crackled immediately. It would have done so equally on mine (for I am not ungrateful, and her manners are charming), if my friendship did not flow with my love in so broad and deep a channel that I do not find it easy to divert it into any smaller streams. Formerly my heart could sincerely feed innumerable little streamlets of female friendships, platonic friendships, literary partnerships, serviceable warm good wills, and cheerful self-sacrificing intimacies; and though I have been sometimes blamed for this apparent diffusion, I had affection enough in my composition to answer all these demands; but ‘the seven heads of the Nile’ have now each their appropriate destination; even the little pleasure I had last year in the variety of mixed society is now quite absorbed in my superior happiness at home.
TO MRS. LEADBEATER.
May 4, 1815.