P.S.—I congratulate you on living in the corner of all London that I like
best [Queen's Square, Bloomsbury]. _Apropos_, you are very right about
my voluntary aversion from the painful sides of life. My childhood was
in reality a very mixed experience, full of fever, nightmare, insomnia,
painful days and interminable nights; and I can speak with less authority
of gardens than of that other 'land of counterpane.' But to what end
should we renew these sorrows. The sufferings of life may be handled
by the very greatest in their hours of insight; it is of its pleasures
that our common poems should be formed; these are the experiences that
we should seek to recall or to provoke; and I say with Thoreau, "What
right have I to complain, who have not ceased to wonder?" and, to add
a rider of my own, who have no remedy to offer?