Thank you, my dearest Mrs. Martin, for your kind sign of interest in the questioning note, although I will not praise the stenography of it.  I shall be as brief to-day as you, not quite out of revenge, but because I have been writing to George and am the less prone to activities from having caught cold in an inscrutable manner, and being stiff and sore from head to foot and inclined to be a little feverish and irritable of nerves.  No, it is not of the slightest consequence; I tell you the truth.  But I would have written to you the day before yesterday if it had not been for this something between cramp and rheumatism, which was rather unbearable at first, but yesterday was better, and is to-day better than better, and to-morrow will leave me quite well, if I may prophesy.  I only mention it lest you should have upbraided me for not answering your note in a moment, as it deserved to be answered.  So don’t put any nonsense into Georgie’s head—­forgive me for beseeching you!  I have been very well—­downstairs seven or eight times; lying on the floor in Papa’s room; meditating the chair, which would have amounted to more than a meditation except for this little contrariety.  In a day or two more, if this cool warmth perseveres in serving me, and no Ariel refills me ‘with aches,’ I shall fulfil your kind wishes perhaps and be out—­and so, no more about me!...

Oh, I do believe you think me a Cockney—­a metropolitan barbarian!  But I persist in seeing no merit and no superior innocence in being shut up even in precincts of rose-trees, away from those great sources of human sympathy and occasions of mental elevation and instruction without which many natures grow narrow, many others gloomy, and perhaps, if the truth were known, very few prosper entirely, lit is not that I, who have always lived a good deal in solitude and live in it still more now, and love the country even painfully in my recollections of it, would decry either one or the other—­solitude is most effective in a contrast, and if you do not break the bark you cannot bud the tree, and, in short (not to be in long), I could write a dissertation, which I will spare you, ‘about it and about it.’ ...

Tell George to lend you—­nay, I think I will be generous and let him give you, although the author gave me the book—­the copy of the new epic, ‘Orion,’ which he has with him.  You have probably observed the advertisement, and are properly instructed that Mr. Horne the poet, who has sold three editions already at a farthing a copy, and is selling a fourth at a shilling, and is about to sell a fifth at half a crown (on the precise principle of the aerial machine—­launching himself into popularity by a first impulse on the people), is my unknown friend, with whom I have corresponded these four years without having seen his face.  Do you remember the beech leaves sent to me from Epping Forest?  Yes, you must.  Well, the sender is the poet, and the poem I think a very noble one, and I want you to think so too.  So hereby I empower you to take it away from George and keep it for my sake—­if you will!