. . . I have brought down here with me Sydney Smith's Works, now first
collected: you will delight in them: I shall bring them to Suffolk when I
come: and it will not be long, I dare say, before I come, as there is to
be rather a large meeting of us at Boulge this August. I have got the
fidgets in my right arm and hand (how the inconvenience redoubles as one
mentions it)--do you know what the fidgets are?--a true ailment, though
perhaps not a dangerous one. Here I am again in the land of old
Bunyan--better still in the land of the more perennial Ouse, making many
a fantastic winding and going much out of his direct way to fertilize and
adorn. Fuller supposes that he lingers thus in the pleasant fields of
Bedfordshire, being in no hurry to enter the more barren fens of
Lincolnshire. So he says. This house is just on the edge of the town: a
garden on one side skirted by the public road which again is skirted by a
row of such Poplars as only the Ouse knows how to rear--and pleasantly
they rustle now--and the room in which I write is quite cool and opens
into a greenhouse which opens into said garden: and it's all deuced
pleasant. For in half an hour I shall seek my Piscator, {61a} and we
shall go to a Village {61b} two miles off and fish, and have tea in a pot-
house, and so walk home. For all which idle ease I think I must be
damned. I begin to have dreadful suspicions that this fruitless way of
life is not looked upon with satisfaction by the open eyes above. One
really ought to dip for a little misery: perhaps however all this ease is
only intended to turn sour by and bye, and so to poison one by the very
nature of self-indulgence. Perhaps again as idleness is so very great a
trial of virtue, the idle man who keeps himself tolerably chaste, etc.,
may deserve the highest reward; the more idle, the more deserving. Really
I don't jest: but I don't propound these things as certain.
There is a fair review of Shelley in the new Edinburgh: saying the truth
on many points where the truth was not easily enunciated, as I believe.
Now, dear sir, I have said all I have to say: and Carlyle says, you know,
it is dangerous to attempt to say more. So farewell for the present: if
you like to write soon, direct to the Post Office, Bedford: if not, I
shall soon be at Woodbridge to anticipate the use of your pen.
HALVERSTOWN, {62} _Sunday_, Oct. 20, [1839].