opening a new book therein. A floating
idea of going up above the snow-line in Switzerland, and living in some
astonishing convent, hovers about me. If _Household Words_ could be got
into a good train, in short, I don't know in what strange place, or at
what remote elevation above the level of the sea, I might fall to work
next. _Restlessness_, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving
me, and I cannot help it. I have rested nine or ten weeks, and sometimes
feel as if it had been a year--though I had the strangest nervous
miseries before I stopped. If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should
just explode and perish." Again, four months later he wrote: "You will
hear of me in Paris, probably next Sunday, and I _may_ go on to
Bordeaux. Have general ideas of emigrating in the summer to the
mountain-ground between France and Spain. Am altogether in a dishevelled
state of mind--motes of new books in the dirty air, miseries of older
growth threatening to close upon me. Why is it, that as with poor David,
a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits,
as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion
I have never made?"

Early in 1856 (20th of January) the notion revisited him of writing a
book in solitude. "Again I am beset by my former notions of a book
whereof the whole story shall be on the top of the Great St. Bernard. As
I accept and reject ideas for _Little Dorrit_, it perpetually comes back
to me. Two or three years hence, perhaps you'll find me living with the
Monks and the Dogs a whole winter--among the blinding snows that fall
about that monastery. I have a serious idea that I shall do it, if I
live." He was at this date in Paris; and during the visit to him of
Macready in the following April, the self-revelations were resumed. The
great actor was then living in retirement at Sherborne, to which he had
gone on quitting the stage; and Dickens gave favourable report of his
enjoyment of the change to his little holiday at Paris. Then, after
recurring to his own old notion of having some slight idea of going to
settle in Australia, only he could not do it until he should have
finished _Little Dorrit_, he went on to say that perhaps Macready, if he
could get into harness again, would not be the worse for some such
troubles as were worrying himself. "It fills me with pity to think of
him away in that lonely Sherborne place. I have always felt of myself
that I must, plea