Have you done with my Doctor? If you have, will you send him to me here:
Boulge Hall, Woodbridge, per Shannon Coach? You may book it at the Boar
and Castle, Oxford Street, close by Hanway Passage. This is not far out
of your beat. Perhaps I should not have sent for this book (it is
Bernard Barton the Quaker who asks to read it) but that it gives me an
excuse also to talk a little to you. Ah! I wish you were here to walk
with me now that the warm weather is come at last. Things have been
delayed but to be more welcome, and to burst forth twice as thick and
beautiful. This is boasting however, and counting of the chickens before
they are hatched: the East winds may again plunge us back into winter:
but the sunshine of this morning fills one's pores with jollity, as if
one had taken laughing gas. Then my house is getting on: the books are
up in the bookshelves and do my heart good: then Stothard's Canterbury
Pilgrims are over the fireplace: Shakespeare in a recess: how I wish you
were here for a day or two! My sister is very well and cheerful and we
have kept house very pleasantly together. My brother John's wife is, I
fear, declining very fast: it is very probable that I shall have to go
and see her before long: though this is a visit I should gladly be
spared. They say that her mind is in a very beautiful state of
peacefulness. She _may_ rally in the summer: but the odds are much
against her. We shall lose a perfect Lady, in the complete sense of the
word, when she dies.
I have been doing very little since I have been here: having accomplished
only a few Idylls of Theocritus, which harmonize with this opening of the
fine weather. Is all this poor occupation for a man who has a soul to
account for? You think so certainly. My dear Allen, you, with your
accustomed humility, asked me if I did not think you changed when I was
last in London: never did I see man less so: indeed you stand on too sure
a footing to change, I am persuaded. But you will not thank me for
telling you these things: but I wish you to believe that I rejoice as
much as ever in the thought of you, and feel confident that you will ever
be to me the same best of friends that you ever have been. I owe more to
you than to all others put together. I am sure, for myself, that the
main difference in our opinions (considered so destructive to friendship
by so many pious men) is a difference in the Understanding, not in the
Heart: and though you may not agree entirely in this, I am confident that
it will never separate you from me.
Mrs. Schutz is much delighted with the books you got for her: and still
enquires if you hurt your health in searching. This she does in all
simplicity and kindness. She has been very ill all the winter: but I see
by a letter I have just had from her that her mind is still cheerful and
the same. The _mens sana in corpore sano_ of old age is most to be
wondered at.
_To Bernard Barton_. {50a}
LONDON, _April_, 1838.