I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My
sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I
consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it
in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more
ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia,
cardemoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and
friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home,
is, that I am never alone. Plato's--(I write to W.W. now)--Plato's
double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in
the system of its first creation, than I sometimes do to be but for
a moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office,
which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never
so. I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers
his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am
pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or
compare sum with sum, and write 'paid' against this, and 'unpaid'
against t'other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind 'some
darling thoughts all my own',--faint memory of some passage in a book,
or the tone of an absent friend's voice--a snatch of Miss Burrell's
singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face. The two
operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as
the sun's two motions (earth's, I mean), or, as I sometimes turn
round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking
longitudinally in the front; or, as the shoulder of veal twists round
with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney. But there are
a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres--the gay science--who come to
me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British
Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, &c.--what Coleridge said at the lecture
last night--who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible
use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as well have been
Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian
hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should
find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its intervals,
perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at
the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in
between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come
to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of
them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for
a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go,
mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury
them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door,
in comes Mr. ----, or Mr. ----, or Demi-gorgon, or my brother, or
somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely
necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O, the pleasure of eating
alone!--eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they
come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of
orange--for my meat turns into stone when anyone dines with me, if I
have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into
acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(God
bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still
greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring
upon me, choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they
leave me on, if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to
these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is,
this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes
by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its
dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always
like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (_divine_
forsooth!) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a
week would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I
assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to
myself. I am never C.L., but always C.L. & Co. He who thought it
not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious
monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time, but even
there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week,
generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the
hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bed-room window is
the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I take them
to be chorus singers of the two theatres (it must be _both of them_),
begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive) who,
being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the
play-houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop, or
some cheap composer, arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in
chorus. At least, I never can catch any of the text of the plain song,
nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. 'That fury
being quench'd'--the howl I mean--a burden succeeds of shouts and
clapping, and knocking of the table. At length overtasked nature drops
under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet
silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at
cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christabel's father used
(bless me, I have dipt in the wrong ink!) to say every morning by way
of variety when he awoke:
Every knell, the Baron saith,
Wakes us up to a world of death--
or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale,
is, that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not
that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so
anxious to drive away the harpy solitude from me. I like 'em, and
cards, and a cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea
between office confinement and after-office society, how little time
I can call my own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an
inference. I would not that I know of have it otherwise. I only wish
sometimes I could exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces
and voices which a late visitation brought most welcome, and carried
away, leaving regret, but more pleasure, even a kind of gratitude, at
being so often favoured with that kind northern visitation. My London
faces and noises don't hear me--I mean no disrespect, or I should
explain myself, that instead of their return 220 times a year, and
the return of W.W., &c., seven times in 104 weeks, some more equal
distribution might be found. I have scarce room to put in Mary's kind
love, and my poor name ...--goes on lecturing.... I mean to hear some
of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the
lecturer may be. If _read_, they are dismal flat, and you can't think
why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you
could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore,
I am always in pain, lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail
the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honour
of me at the London Tavern. 'Gentlemen,' said I, and there I stopped;
the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs.
Wordsworth _will_ go on, kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the
lakes once more, which never can be realised. Between us there is a
great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I
hope, as there seemed to be between me and that gentleman concerned
in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon's. I
think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office. I hate all
such people--accountants' deputy accountants. The dear abstract notion
of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather
poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such
beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her
of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days,
they had done their worst; but I was deceived in the length to which
heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go. They are the
tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this week, they
have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one
o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us. Dear
W.W., be thankful for liberty.