hey should go out to the world, well, let them go! In
publishing them I am but obeying a last message of love.

T. B.
MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
Feb. 20, 1905.

THE UPTON LETTERS

MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
Jan. 23, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have just heard the disheartening news, and I write
to say that I am sorry toto corde. I don't yet know the full extent of
the calamity, the length of your exile, the place, or the conditions
under which you will have to live. Perhaps you or Nelly can find time
to let me have a few lines about it all? But I suppose there is a good
side to it. I imagine that when the place is once fixed, you will be
able to live a much freer life than you have of late been obliged to
live in England, with less risk and less overshadowing of anxiety. If
you can find the right region, renovabitur ut acquila juventus tua; and
you will be able to carry out some of the plans which have been so
often interrupted here. Of course there will be drawbacks. Books,
society, equal talk, the English countryside which you love so well,
and, if I may use the expression, so intelligently; they will all have
to be foregone in a measure. But fortunately there is no difficulty
about money, and money will give you back some of these delights. You
will still see your real friends; and they will come to you with the
intention of giving and getting the best of themselves and of you, not
in the purposeless way in which one drifts into a visit here. You will
be able, too, to view things with a certain detachment--and that is a
real advantage; for I have sometimes thought that your literary work
has suffered from the variety of your interests, and from your being
rather too close to them to form a philosophical view. Your love of
characteristic points of natural scenery will help you. When you have
once grown familiar with the new surroundings, you will penetrate the
secret of their charm, as you have done here. You will be able, too, to
live a more undisturbed life, not fretted by all the cross-currents
which distract a man in his own land, when he has a large variety of
ties. I declare I did not know I was so good a rhetorician; I shall end
by convincing myself that there is no real happiness to be found except
in expatriation!

Seriously, my dear Herbert, I do understand the sadness of the change;
but one gets no good by dwelling on the darker side; there are and will
be times, I know, of depression.