O! the _Travelling Companion_ won't do; I am back on it entirely: it is
a foul, gross, bitter, ugly daub, with lots of stuff in it, and no
urbanity and no glee and no true tragedy--to the crows with it, a
carrion tale! I will do no more carrion, I have done too much in this
carrion epoch; I will now be clean; and by clean, I don't mean any folly
about purity, but such things as a healthy man with his bowels open
shall find fit to see and speak about without a pang of nausea.--I am,
yours,

A REPENTANT DANKIST.

The lakeists, the drainists, the brookists, and the riverites; let me be
a brookist, _faute de mieux_.

I did enjoy myself in town, and was a thousandfold the better of it.

TO MISS MONROE

[_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 1886._]

MY DEAR MISS MONROE,--I am ill in bed and stupid, incoherently stupid;
yet I have to answer your letter, and if the answer is incomprehensible
you must forgive me. You say my letter caused you pleasure; I am sure,
as it fell out, not near so much as yours has brought to me. The
interest taken in an author is fragile: his next book, or your next year
of culture, might see the interest frosted or outgrown; and himself, in
spite of all, you might probably find the most distasteful person upon
earth. My case is different. I have bad health, am often condemned to
silence for days together--was so once for six weeks, so that my voice
was awful to hear when I first used it, like the whisper of a
shadow--have outlived all my chief pleasures, which were active and
adventurous, and ran in the open air: and being a person who prefers
life to art, and who knows it is a far finer thing to be in love, or to
risk a danger, than to paint the finest picture or write the noblest
book, I begin to regard what remains to me of my life as very shadowy.
From a variety of reasons, I am ashamed to confess I was much in this
humour when your letter came. I had a good many troubles; was regretting
a high average of sins; had been recently reminded that I had outlived
some friends, and wondering if I had not outlived some friendships; and
had just, while boasting of better health, been struck down again by my
haunting enemy, an enemy who was exciting at first, but has now, by the
iteration of his strokes, become merely annoying and inexpressibly
irksome. Can you fancy that to a person drawing towards the elderly this
sort of conjunction of circumstances brings a rather aching sense of th