The weather is so delicious that I have not the heart to begin work. I take a lesson every day in drawing, and am going through the whole of my sketches, which then will be put in a huge book. It is wonderful, as in the case of Spain, how they carry you back to scenes long forgotten, and awaken a million events hived in the brain, which, like dewdrops on the boughs, only fall when touched! There’s a go!
I don’t wonder at the contending elements that are now fermenting in your noddle. They will all settle down into a delicious elixir to sweeten future existence, and make cheerful the domestic fireside when a lull comes—which will happen, and indeed ought to happen, as we can’t be always living on cayenne and lollypops.
November 6, 1840.
I assure you I have been so scared about war, and the exposed site of Heavitree between Exmouth and Exeter, that I have been meditating moving up land my Wilsons and roba fina. However, I think the storm is clearing away. Vive Louis Philippe!
While you are hunting of foxes, I am going to hunt through Minaño. I begin Spanish Handbook next week.
Wednesday, November 18, 1840.
The Minaños frighten me, like the great Genius did the Arabian fisherman. How am I to get this mass into the small pot or duodecimo handbook?
Handbook lingers. I have made no progress, and am tempted to give it up. I am all for the sublime and beautiful, sententious and sesquipedalian. I can’t cool my style to the tone of a way-bill.
Gradually the work shaped itself in his mind and in print.
“Part of Handbook” (he writes, January 14th, 1841) “is gone to press.” “I am meditating” (he says, February 16th, 1841) “a serious go at the Handbook, and have got about forty pages of preliminary remarks in print, which I am told are amusing. I have written them off like a letter, sermone pedestri, without, however, forgetting the ajo y cibolla [garlic and onion].”