How my sheet is filling with dull talk about mere economics! I must still add that the Lecturing I talked of, last time, is verily over now; and well over. The superfine people listened to the rough utterance with patience, with favor, increasing to the last. I sent you a Newspaper once, to indicate that it was in progress. I know not yet what the money result is; but I suppose it will enable us to exist here thriftily another year; not without hope of at worst doing the like again when the time comes. It is a great novelty in my lot; felt as a very considerable blessing; and really it has arrived, if it have arrived, in due time, for I had begun to get quite impatient of the other method. Poverty and Youth may do; Poverty and Age go badly together.—For the rest, I feel fretted to fiddle-strings; my head and heart all heated, sick,—ah me! The question as ever is: Rest. But then where? My Brother invites us to come to Rome for the winter; my poor sick Wife might perhaps profit by it; as for me, Natty Leatherstocking’s lodge in the Western Wood, I think, were welcomer still. I have a great mind, too, to run off and see my Mother, by the new railways. What we shall do, whether not stay quietly here, must remain uncertain for a week or two. Write you always hither, till you hear otherwise.
The Orations were right welcome; my Madeira one, returned thence with Sterling, was circulating over the West of England. Sterling and Harriet stretched out the right hand with wreathed smiles. I have read, a second or third time. Robert Southey has got a copy, for his own behoof and that of Lakeland: if he keep his word as to me, he may do as much for you, or more. Copies are at Cambridge; among the Oxonians too;