d
very large for her days--squalls and sucks incessantly. Are you
answered? Her mother is doing very well, and up again.

"I have now been married a year on the second of this
month--heigh-ho! I have seen nobody lately much worth noting,
except S * * and another general of the Gauls, once or twice at
dinners out of doors. S * * is a fine, foreign, villanous-looking,
intelligent, and very agreeable man; his compatriot is more of the
_petit-maitre_, and younger, but I should think not at all of the
same intellectual calibre with the Corsican--which S * *, you know,
is, and a cousin of Napoleon's.

"Are you never to be expected in town again? To be sure, there is
no one here of the 1500 fillers of hot-rooms, called the
fashionable world. My approaching papa-ship detained us for advice,
&c. &c. though I would as soon be here as any where else on this
side of the Straits of Gibraltar.

"I would gladly--or, rather, sorrowfully--comply with your request
of a dirge for the poor girl you mention.[90] But how can I write
on one I have never seen or known? Besides, you will do it much
better yourself. I could not write upon any thing, without some
personal experience and foundation; far less on a theme so
peculiar. Now, you have both in this case; and, if you had neither,
you have more imagination, and would never fail.

"This is but a dull scrawl, and I am but a dull fellow. Just at
present, I am absorbed in 500 contradictory contemplations, though
with but one object in view--which will probably end in nothing, as
most things we wish do. But never mind,--as somebody says, 'for the
blue sky bends over all.' I only could be glad, if it bent over me
where it is a little bluer; like the 'skyish top of blue Olympus,'
which, by the way, looked very white when I last saw it.

"Ever," &c.

[Footnote 90: I had mentioned to him, as a subject worthy of his best
powers of pathos, a melancholy event which had just occurred in my
neighbourhood, and to which I have myself made allusion in one of the
Sacred Melodies--"Weep not for her."]

* * * * *

On reading over the foregoing letter, I was much struck by the tone of
melancholy that pervaded it; and well knowing it to be the habit of the
writer's mind to seek relief, when under the pressure of any disquiet