I am writing to you, you see, just as if I had not been silent for so long.  I take you at your word, and expect Margot to be always the same to a comrade.

If you were only here!  Keats said that “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”  How false!

    Yes, thus it is:  somewhere by me
      Unheard, by me unfelt, unknown,
    The laughing, rippling notes of thee
      Are sounding still; while I alone
    Am left to sit and sigh and say—­
      Music unheard is sweet as they.

This is no momentary mood, and no light bubble-breath of improvisatory verse.  It expresses what I often feel when, after a long night’s work, I light my candle and take a look before I go to bed at your portrait in the corner of my stove.

I have been labouring intensely at my autobiography.  It is blocked out, and certain parts of it are written for good.  But a thing of this sort ought to be a master’s final piece of work—­and it is very exhausting to produce.

Am Hof, Davos Platz, Switzerland, Sept. 27th, 1891.

My dear Margot,

I am sending you back your two typewritten records.  They are both very interesting, the one as autobiographical and a study of your family, the other as a vivid and, I think, justly critical picture of Gladstone.  It will have a great literary value sometime.  I do not quite feel with Jowett, who told you, did he not? that you had made him understand Gladstone.  But I feel that you have offered an extremely powerful and brilliant conception, which is impressive and convincing because of your obvious sincerity and breadth of view.  The purely biographical and literary value of this bit of work seems to me very great, and makes me keenly wish that you would record all your interesting experiences, and your first-hand studies of exceptional personalities in the same way.

Gradually, by doing this, you would accumulate material of real importance; much better than novels or stories, and more valuable than the passionate utterances of personal emotion.

Did I ever show you the record I privately printed of an evening passed by me at Woolner, the sculptor’s, when Gladstone met Tennyson for the first time?  If I had been able to enjoy more of such incidents, I should also have made documents.  But my opportunities have been limited.  For future historians, the illuminative value of such writing will be incomparable.

I suppose I must send the two pieces back to Glen.  Which I will do, together with this letter.  Let me see what you write.  I think you have a very penetrative glimpse into character, which comes from perfect disengagement and sympathy controlled by a critical sense.  The absence of egotism is a great point.