You know my way of life so well that I need not describe it to you, as it has undergone no change since I saw you.  I read of mornings—­the same old books over and over again, having no command of new ones; walk with my great black dog of an afternoon, and at evening sit with open windows, up to which China-roses climb, with my pipe, while the blackbirds and thrushes begin to rustle bedwards in the garden, and the nightingale to have the neighbourhood to herself.  We have had such a spring (bating the last ten days) as would have satisfied even you with warmth.  And such verdure! white clouds moving over the new-fledged tops of oak-trees, and acres of grass striving with buttercups.  How old to tell of, how new to see!  I believe that Leslie’s “Life of Constable” (a very charming book) has given me a fresh love of spring.  Constable loved it above all seasons:  he hated autumn.  When Sir G. Beaumont, who was of the old classical taste, asked him if he did not find it difficult to place his brown tree in his pictures, “Not at all,” said C, “I never put one in at all.”  And when Sir George was crying up the tone of the old masters’ landscapes, and quoting an old violin as the proper tone of colour for a picture, Constable got up, took an old Cremona, and laid it down on the sunshiny grass.  You would like the book.  In defiance of all this, I have hung my room with pictures, like very old fiddles indeed; but I agree with Sir George and Constable both.  I like pictures that are not like nature.  I can have nature better than any picture by looking out of my window.  Yet I respect the man who tries to paint up to the freshness of earth and sky.  Constable did not wholly achieve what he tried at:  and perhaps the old masters chose a soberer scale of things as more within the compass of lead paint.  To paint dew with lead!...

* * * * *

It is now the 8th of December; it has blown a most desperate east wind, all razors; a wind like one of those knives one sees at shops in London, with 365 blades all drawn and pointed.  The wheat is all sown; the fallows cannot be ploughed.  What are all the poor folks to do during the winter?  And they persist in having the same enormous families they used to do; a woman came to me two days ago who had seventeen children!  What farmers are to employ all these?  What landlord can find room for them?  The law of Generation must be repealed....

DEAR CARLYLE,
[Sidenote:  Edward FitzGerald]

I should sometimes write to you if I had anything worth telling, or worth putting you to the trouble of answering me.  About twice in a year, however, I do not mind asking you one thing which is easily answered, how you and Mrs. Carlyle are?  And yet, perhaps, it is not so easy for you to tell me so much about yourself:  for your “well-being” comprises a good deal!  That you are not carried off by the cholera I take for granted, since else I should have seen in the papers some controversy with Doctor Wordsworth as to whether you were to be buried in Westminster Abbey, by the side of Wilberforce perhaps!  Besides, a short note from Thackeray a few weeks ago told me you had been to see him.  I conclude also from this that you have not been a summer excursion of any distance.