but not just yet.  Here I live with tolerable content:  perhaps with as much as most people arrive at, and what if one were properly grateful one would perhaps call perfect happiness.  Here is a glorious sunshiny day:  all the morning I read about Nero in Tacitus, lying at full length on a bench in the garden, a nightingale singing, and some red anemones eyeing the sun manfully not far off.  A funny mixture all this, Nero, and the delicacy of spring, all very human however.  Then at half-past one lunch on Cambridge cream cheese:  then a ride over hill and dale:  then spudding up some weeds from the grass:  and then, coming in, I sit down to write to you, my sister winding red worsted from the back of a chair, and the most delightful little girl in the world chattering incessantly.  So runs the world away.  You think I live in Epicurean ease; but this happens to be a jolly day:  one isn’t always well, or tolerably good, the weather is not always clear, nor nightingales singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant atrocity.  But such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end of it....

Give my love to Thackeray from your upper window across the street.

...  I am living (did I tell you this before?) at a little cottage close by the lawn gates, where I have my books, a barrel of beer, which I tap myself (can you tap a barrel of beer?), and an old woman to do for me.  I have also just concocted two gallons of tar-water under the directions of Bishop Berkeley:  it is to be bottled off this very day after a careful skimming, and then drunk by those who can and will.  It is to be tried first on my old woman; if she survives, I am to begin; and it will then gradually spread into the parish, through England, Europe, etc., “as the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake.”

...  Does the thought ever strike you, when looking at pictures in a house, that you are to run and jump at one, and go right through it into some scene-behind-scene world on the other side, as harlequins do?  A steady portrait especially invites one to do so:  the quietude of it ironically tempts one to outrage it.  One feels it would close again over the panel, like water, as if nothing had happened.  That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Laurence has given me:  not swords, nor cannon, nor all the bulls of Bashan butting at it could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead.  No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude; no wonder his view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences of men cannot endure it.  Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding’s forehead.  We find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things:  you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says.  He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the Lake of Geneva.  We have great laughing over this.  The forehead is at present in Pembrokeshire, I believe; or Glamorganshire; or Monmouthshire:  it is hard to say which.  It has gone to spend its Christmas there....