I've to get a year's dead sticks out of the wood, and see to the
new oat field on the moor, and prepare lectures for October!

I'm _so_ idle. I look at the hills out of bed, and at the pictures off
the sofa. Let us _both_ be useless beings; let us be butterflies,
grasshoppers, lambs, larks, anything for an easy life. I'm quite
horrified to see, now that these two have come back, what a lot of
books I've written, and how cruel I've been to myself and everybody
else who ever has to read them. I'm too sleepy to finish this note.

* * * * *

_13th June._

I do not know when I have received, or how I _could_ receive so great
an encouragement in all my work, as I do in hearing that you, after
all your long love and watchfulness of flowers, have yet gained
pleasure and insight from "Proserpina" as to leaf structure. The
examples you send me are indeed admirable. Can you tell me the exact
name of the plant, that I may quote it?

Yes, and the weather also is a great blessing to me--so lovely this
morning.

* * * * *

I'm getting steadily better, and breathing the sunshine a little again
in soul and lips. But I always feel so naughty after having had
morning prayers, and that the whole house is a sort of little Bethel
that I've no business in.

I'm reading history of early saints too, for my Amiens book, and feel
that I ought to be scratched, or starved, or boiled, or something
unpleasant, and I don't know if I'm a saint or a sinner in the least,
in mediaeval language. How did saints feel themselves, I wonder, about
their saintship?

* * * * *

It is _such_ a joy to hear that you enjoy anything of mine, and a
double joy to have your sympathy in my love of those Italians. How I
wish there were more like you! What a happy world it would be if a
quarter of the people in it cared a quarter as much as you and I do,
for what is good and true:

That Nativity _is_ the deepest of all. It is by the master of
Botticelli, you know; and whatever is most sweet and tender in
Botticelli he owes to Lippi.

But, do you know, I quite forget about Cordelia, and where I said it!
please keep it till I come. I hope to be across to see you to-morrow.

They've been doing photographs of me again, and I'm an orang-outang as
usual, and am in despair. I thought with my beard I was beginning to
be just the least bi