. We have had
glorious weather: new pease and young potatoes--fresh milk (how good!)
and a cool library to sit in of mornings. . . .

_To F. Tennyson_.

BEDFORD, _August_ 16, 1842.

DEAR TENNYSON,

I have been long hoping for a letter from you: it has come this morning,
and repays me for all waiting. While you and Morton write to me about
Italy I shall never go to see it. And yet your account of Cicero's
villa, I confess, gives me a twinge. But of this I am sure: if I saw all
these fine things with the bodily eye, I should but see them as a scene
in a play, with the additional annoyance of being bitten with fleas
perhaps, and being in a state of transition which is not suitable to me:
whereas while you see them, and will represent them to me, I see them
through your imagination, and that is better than any light of my own.
This is very true, I assure you: and you and Morton have given me quite a
different view of Italy to what I had before: a much more enchanting one,
but not the more likely to seduce me into making the false step of trying
to realize it for myself. . . . In the mean time how tired and bored
would you be to take one of my travels--a voyage of eight miles from
Bedford perhaps--travelled twenty times before--every winding of the
river, every church-spire, every country pot house and the quality of its
beer, well known. No surprise at all. Nil admirari--I find that old
Horace is a good fellow-traveller in England: so is Virgil. It is odd
that those fellows living in the land they did live in should have talked
so coldly about it. As to Alfred's book, I believe it has sold well: but
I have not seen him for a long while, and have had no means of hearing
about the matter except from Thompson, who told me that very many copies
had been sold at Cambridge, which indeed will be the chief market for
them. Neither have I seen any notice of them in print except that in the
Examiner; and that seemed so quiet that I scarce supposed it was by
Forster. Alfred himself is, I believe, in Kent at present. And now, my
dear Frederic, why do you think of returning to England? Depend upon it
you are better off as you are. You will never turn magistrate nor bean-
dibbler, nor make yourself of use in the country, and therefore why
should you not live where you like to live best? When I read of your
laughing and singing and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying
beakers full of the warm South I am sure you