“I finished—­and sealed up—­and addressed—­my last bit of work, last night by ten o’clock—­ready to send by to-day’s post—­so that my father should receive it with this.  I could not at all have done it had I stayed at home:  for even with all the quiet here, I have had no more time than was necessary.  For exercise, I find the rowing very useful, though it makes me melancholy with thinking of 1838,—­and the lake, when it is quite calm, is wonderfully sad and quiet:—­no bright colours—­no snowy peaks.  Black water—­as still as death;—­lonely, rocky islets—­leafless woods,—­or worse than leafless—­the brown oak foliage hanging dead upon them; gray sky;—­far-off, wild, dark, dismal moorlands; no sound except the rustling of the boat among the reeds.

     “One o’clock.—­I have your kind note and my father’s, and am very
     thankful that you like what I have written, for I did not at all
     know myself whether it were good or bad.”

In the early summer he went to Oxford, for a meeting of the British Association.  He said (June 27, 1847): 

“I am not able to write a full account of all I see, to amuse you, for I find it necessary to keep as quiet as I can, and I fear it would only annoy you to be told of all the invitations I refuse, and all the interesting matters in which I take no part.  There is nothing for it but throwing one’s self into the stream, and going down with one’s arms under water, ready to be carried anywhere, or do anything.  My friends are all busy, and tired to death.  All the members of my section, but especially (Edward) Forbes, Sedgwick, Murchison, and Lord Northampton—­and of course Buckland, are as kind to me as men can be; but I am tormented by the perpetual sense of my unmitigated ignorance, for I know no more now than I did when a boy, and I have only one perpetual feeling of being in everybody’s way.  The recollections of the place, too, and the being in my old rooms, make me very miserable.  I have not one moment of profitably spent time to look back to while I was here, and much useless labour and disappointed hope; and I can neither bear the excitement of being in the society where the play of mind is constant, and rolls over me like heavy wheels, nor the pain of being alone.  I get away in the evenings into the hayfields about Cumnor, and rest; but then my failing sight plagues me.  I cannot look at anything as I used to do, and the evening sky is covered with swimming strings and eels.  My best time is while I am in the Section room, for though it is hot, and sometimes wearisome, yet I have nothing to say,—­little to do,—­nothing to look at, and as much as I like to hear.”

He had to undergo a second disappointment in love; his health broke down again, and he was sent to Leamington to his former doctor, Jephson, once more a “consumptive” patient.  Dieted into health, he went to Scotland with a new-found friend, William Macdonald Macdonald of Crossmount.  But he had no taste for sport, and could make little use of his opportunities for distraction and relaxation.  One battue was enough for him, and the rest of the visit was spent in morbid despondency, digging thistles, and brooding over the significance of the curse of Eden, so strangely now interwoven with his own life—­“Thorns a also and Thistles.”