First, Swan's application for your address; second, a sight
of the sheets of your _Landscape_ book; and last, your note to Swan,
which he was so kind as to forward. I trust you will never suppose me
to be guilty of anything more serious than an idleness, partially
excusable. My ill-health makes my rate of life heavier than I can well
meet, and yet stops me from earning more. My conscience, sometimes
perhaps too easily stifled, but still (for my time of life and the
public manners of the age) fairly well alive, forces me to perpetual and
almost endless transcriptions. On the back of all this, my
correspondence hangs like a thundercloud; and just when I think I am
getting through my troubles, crack, down goes my health, I have a long,
costly sickness, and begin the world again. It is fortunate for me I
have a father, or I should long ago have died; but the opportunity of
the aid makes the necessity none the more welcome. My father has
presented me with a beautiful house here--or so I believe, for I have
not yet seen it, being a cage bird but for nocturnal sorties in the
garden. I hope we shall soon move into it, and I tell myself that some
day perhaps we may have the pleasure of seeing you as our guest. I trust
at least that you will take me as I am, a thoroughly bad correspondent,
and a man, a hater, indeed, of rudeness in others, but too often rude in
all unconsciousness himself; and that you will never cease to believe
the sincere sympathy and admiration that I feel for you and for your
work.

About the _Landscape_, which I had a glimpse of while a friend of mine
was preparing a review, I was greatly interested, and could write and
wrangle for a year on every page; one passage particularly delighted me,
the part about Ulysses--jolly. Then, you know, that is just what I fear
I have come to think landscape ought to be in literature; so there we
should be at odds. Or perhaps not so much as I suppose, as Montaigne
says it is a pot with two handles, and I own I am wedded to the
technical handle, which (I likewise own and freely) you do well to keep
for a mistress. I should much like to talk with you about some other
points; it is only in talk that one gets to understand. Your delightful
Wordsworth trap I have tried on two hardened Wordsworthians, not that I
am not one myself. By covering up the context, and asking them to guess
what the passage was, both (and both are very clever people, one a
writer, one a painter) pronou