Thursday, August 26.
Gamba.
"On Thursday Gamba came, just as I was giving him up in a high state of despair and mystification. We hurried at once by Padua to Venice, where I found your letter.
I look back and feel ashamed,
and make a clumsy excuse.
"As I look through what I have written, before sending it off to you, I feel, painfully, that my style is clumsy, stuttering, incoherent; that I am wordy, without saying enough; that I am overfree in my use of fanciful epithets, without giving an adequate idea of the suggestive beauty of what I see; that I am sometimes almost mawkish, without saying half I feel; that I am incorrigibly slovenly and forgetful; that I can't write, that I can't spell. In answer to all this, I can only answer by referring to a little premonitory observation at the foot of my first page, i.e. Quality of Pebbles not warranted.
BATCH No. 2.
(This blank represents three weeks.)
Sept. 16.