Fate meant me only to light upon gay things this morning:  listen to this and guess where it comes from: 

    “When March with variant winds was past,
     And April had with her silver showers
     Ta’en leif at life with an orient blast;
     And lusty May, that mother of flowers,
     Had made the birds to begin their hours,
     Among the odours ruddy and white,
     Whose harmony was the ear’s delight: 

    “In bed at morrow I sleeping lay;
     Methought Aurora, with crystal een,
     In at the window looked by day,
     And gave me her visage pale and green;
     And on her hand sang a lark from the splene,
     ’Awake ye lovers from slumbering! 
     See how the lusty morrow doth spring!’”

Ah, but you are no scholar of the things in your own tongue!  That is Dunbar, a Scots poet contemporary of Henry VII., just a little bit altered by me to make him soundable to your ears.  If I had not had to leave an archaic word here and there, would you ever have guessed he lay outside this century?  That shows the permanent element in all good poetry, and in all good joy in things also.  In the four centuries since that was written we have only succeeded in worsening the meaning of certain words, as for instance “spleen,” which now means irritation and vexation, but stood then for quite the opposite—­what we should call, I suppose, “a full heart.”  It is what I am always saying—­a good digestion is the root of nearly all the good living and high thinking we are capable of:  and the spleen was then the root of the happy emotions as it is now of the miserable ones.  Your pre-Reformation lark sang from “a full stomach,” and thanked God it had a constitution to carry it off without affectation:  and your nineteenth century lark applying the same code of life, his plain-song is mere happy everyday prose, and not poetry at all as we try to make it out to be.

I have no news for you at all of anyone:  all inside the house is a simmer of peace and quiet, with blinds drawn down against the heat the whole day long.  No callers; and as for me, I never call elsewhere.  The gossips about here eke out a precarious existence by washing each other’s dirty linen in public:  and the process never seems to result in any satisfactory cleansing.

I avoid saying what news I trust to-morrow’s post-bag may contain for me.  Every wish I send you comes “from the spleen,” which means I am very healthy, and, conditionally, as happy as is good for me.  Pray God bless my dear Share of the world, and make him get well for his own and my sake!  Amen.

This catches the noon post, an event which always shows I am jubilant, with a lot of the opposite to a “little death” feeling running over my nerves.  I feel the grass growing under me:  the reverse of poor Keats’ complaint.  Good-by, Beloved, till I find my way into the provender of to-morrow’s post-bag.