had best stay where you are.
I should indeed be very glad to see you again: but then I should miss
hearing from you: and you would only come here to abuse us all and go
back again. You Tennysons are born for warm climates. As to poor
England, I never see a paper, but I think with you that she is on the go.
I used to dread this: but somehow I now contemplate it as a necessary
thing, and, till the shoe begins to pinch me sorely, walk on with some
indifference. It seems impossible the manufacturers can go on as they
are: and impossible that the demand for our goods can continue as of old
in Europe: and impossible but that we must get a rub and licking in some
of our colonies: and if all these things come at once, why then the
devil's in it. I used to think as you do about France and the French:
and we all agreed in London that France should be divided among the other
powers as Poland was: but Donne has given me pause: he says that France
is the great counteracting democratic principle to Russia. This may be:
though I think Russia is too unwieldly and rotten-ripe ever to make a
huge progress in conquest. What is to be thought of a nation where the
upper classes speak the language of another country, and have varnished
over their honest barbarism with the poorest French profligacy and
intrigue? Russia does not seem a whole to me. In the mean time, all
goes on toward better and better, as is my firm belief: and humanity
grows clear by flowing, (very little profited by any single sage or
hero), and man shall have wings to fly and something much better than
that in the end. . . .

I draw a very little, and think of music as I walk in the fields: but
have no piano in this part of the world. . . . I hear there is a fine
new Symphony by Mendelssohn, who is by far our best writer now, and in
some measure combines Beethoven and Handel. I grow every day more and
more to love only the old God save the King style: the common chords,
those truisms of music, like other truisms so little understood in the
full. Just look at the mechanism of Robin Adair.

Now pray write to me again when you can. You don't know how much I
rejoice in your letters.

_To S. Laurence_.

BEDFORD, _Thursday_,
[_August_, 1842.]

DEAR LAURENCE,

. . . I have heard from Morton and F. Tennyson; the letter of the latter
very descriptive and fine. He is summering at Castellamare, and Morton
at Sorrento. What must Italy be if we are complaining of