I heard from Nelly Bordman only a few days before receiving your letter, and so far from preparing me for all this sadness and gloom, she pleased me with her account of you whom she had lately seen—­dwelling upon your retrograde passage into youth, and the delight you were taking in the presence and society of some still more youthful, fair, and gay monstrum amandum, some prodigy of intellectual accomplishment, some little Circe who never turned anybodies into pigs.  I learnt too from her for the first time that you were settled at Hampstead!  Whereabout at Hampstead, and for how long?  She didn’t tell me that, thinking of course that I knew something more about you than I do.  Yes indeed; you do treat me very shabbily.  I agree with you in thinking so.  To think that so many hills and woods should interpose between us—­that I should be lying here, fast bound by a spell, a sleeping beauty in a forest, and that you, who used to be such a doughty knight, should not take the trouble of cutting through even a hazel tree with your good sword, to find out what had become of me.  Now do tell me, the hazel tree being down at last, whether you mean to live at Hampstead, whether you have taken a house there and have carried your books there, and wear Hampstead grasshoppers in your bonnet (as they did at Athens) to prove yourself of the soil.

All this nonsense will make you think I am better, and indeed I am pretty well just now—­quite, however, confined to the bed—­except when lifted from it to the sofa baby-wise while they make it; even then apt to faint.  Bad symptoms too do not leave me; and I am obliged to be blistered every few days—­but I am free from any attack just now, and am a good deal less feverish than I am occasionally.  There has been a consultation between an Exeter physician and my own, and they agree exactly, both hoping that with care I shall pass the winter, and rally in the spring, both hoping that I may be able to go about again with some comfort and independence, although I never can be fit again for anything like exertion....

Do you know, did you ever hear anything of Mr. Horne who wrote ’Cosmo de Medici,’ and the ‘Death of Marlowe,’ and is now desecrating his powers (I beg your pardon) by writing the life of Napoleon?  By the way, he is the author of a dramatic sketch in the last Finden.

He is in my mind one of the very first poets of the day, and has written to me so kindly (offering, although I never saw him in my life, to cater for me in literature, and send me down anything likely to interest me in the periodicals), that I cannot but think his amiability and genius do honor to one another.

Do you remember Mr. Caldicott who used to preach in the infant schoolroom at Sidmouth?  He died here the death of a saint, as he had lived a saintly life, about three weeks ago.  It affected me a good deal.  But he was always so associated in my thoughts more with heaven than earth, that scarcely a transition seems to have passed upon his locality.  ‘Present with the Lord’ is true of him now; even as ’having his conversation in heaven’ was formerly.  There is little difference.