ilroad, near the
Ten-Mile Station, on which she lives; but lo and behold, just as I was
completing my preparations comes an express to say that Mrs. Grote had
been seized with one of her neuralgic headaches, and could not possibly
receive us till to-morrow! so there ended the proposed business of the
day.

I had a visit from John O'Sullivan, a call from Rogers to readjust our
plans for to-morrow, and a very kind long visit from Milman.... I
receive infinite advice on all hands about my perplexed affairs, all of
it most kindly meant, but little of it, alas! available to me. Some of
it, indeed, appears to me so worldly, so false, and so full of
compromise between right and wrong for the mere sake of expediency;
sometimes for cowardice, sometimes for peace, sometimes for pleasure,
sometimes for profit, sometimes for mere social consideration,--the
whole system (for such it is) accepted and acknowledged as a rule of
life--that, as I sit listening to these friendly suggestions, I am half
the time shocked at those who utter them, and the other half shocked at
myself for being shocked at people so much my betters.... My abiding
feeling is that I had better go back to my beloved Lenox, to the side of
the "Bowl" (the Indian name of a beautiful small lake between Lenox and
Stockbridge), among the Berkshire hills, where selfishness and moral
cowardice and worldly expediency exist in each man's practice no doubt
quite sufficiently; but where they are not yet universally recognized as
a social system, by the laws of which civilized existence should be
governed. You know, "a bad action is a thousand times preferable to a
bad principle."

Among the other things which the American mail brought me was a charming
sketch by my friend W---- of the very site upon which we settled that I
should build my house. The drawing is quite rough and unfinished, but
full of suggestion to one who knows the place.

I went by appointment this afternoon to see Lady Dacre. Poor thing! she
was much overcome at the sight of me. Her deep mourning for her young
grandchild, and her pathetic exclamations of almost self-reproach at her
own iron strength and protracted old age, touched me most deeply. She
seemed somewhat comforted at finding that I had not grown quite old and
haggard, and talked to me for an hour of her own griefs and my trials.

She and Lord Dacre pressed me with infinite kindness to go down to them
at the Hoo; and though I felt that if we sa