I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into
Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am
afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey.
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I
never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London,
until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of
you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of
the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and
customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness
round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen,
drunken scenes, rattles;--life awake, if you awake, at all hours of
the night; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon
houses and pavements, the printshops, the old book-stalls, parsons
cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the
pantomimes--London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power
of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me often into
night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the
motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these
emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But
consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent
great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?
My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have
had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering
of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was
born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a
book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog, (only
exceeding him in knowledge,) wherever I have moved, old chairs,
old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old
school,--these are my mistresses,--have I not enough, without your
mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that
the mind will make friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies,
and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in
more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and
tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider
the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to
satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of
a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading
upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have
been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the
inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should
certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.
Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. and yourself; and a kiss
from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play!