Now, my darling, I must tell you that I have got a telegram from my goodman—­the Kapellmeister!—­to say he IS to be sent home in “early spring.”  This is a great comfort.  I would willingly have let him stay two months longer to escape spring cold; but he has got to hate the place so fiercely, that I now long for him to get away at any cost.  It must be most depressing!  The last letter I got, he had had a trip by sea, and said he felt perfectly different till he got back to Colombo, when the oppression seized him again.  He has been to Trincomalee, and is charmed with it, and said he could read small print when he got there, but his eyes quite fail in the muggyness of Colombo.  However he will cheer up now, I hope! and Nov. and Dec. and Jan. are good months.

Now good-bye, dear.  My best love to Aunty and Madre.

Your loving,
J.H.E.

TO A.E.

Ecclesfield. October 24, 1882.

...  It was very vexatious that the Megha Duta came just too late for last mail.  It is a beautiful poem.  Every now and then the local colour has a weird charm all its own.  It lifts one into another land (without any jarring of railway or steamship!) to realize the locale in which rearing masses of grey cumuli suggest elephants rushing into combat!  And the husband’s picture of his wife in his absence is as noble, as sympathetic, and as perceptive as anything of the kind I ever read.  So full of human feeling and so refined.  I enjoyed it very much.  It reminded me, oddly enough, more than once of Young’s Night Thoughts.  I think perhaps (if the charm of another tongue, and the wonder of its antiquity did not lead one to give both more attention and more sympathy than one would perhaps bestow on an English poem) that the poem does not rank much higher than a degree short of the first rank of our poets.  But it is very charming.  And oh, what a lovely text!  It is a most beautiful character....

TO MRS. MEDLEY.

Ecclesfield, Sheffield. November 17, 1822.

MY VERY DEAR MRS. MEDLEY,

There has been long word silence between us!  I made a break in it the other day by sending you my new “Picture Poem”—­“A Week Spent in a Glass Pond.”

It was a sort of repayment of a tender chromolithographic (!) debt.

Do you remember, when Fredericton was our home, and when everything pretty from Old England did look so very pretty—­how on one of those home visits from which he brought back bits of civilization—­the Bishop brought me a “chromo” of dogs and a fox which has hung in every station we’ve had since?