my own room,
for our cousin, Sam Barrett, who brought the interruption yesterday
and put me out of humour (it wasn't the fault of the dear little
cousin, Lizzie ... my 'portrait' ... who was '_so_ sorry,' she said,
dear child, to have missed Papa somewhere on the stairs!) the cousin
who should have been in Brittany yesterday instead of here, sate in
the drawing-room all this morning, and had visitors there, and so I
had excellent excuses for never moving from my chair. Yet, the field
being clear at _half-past two_! I went for half an hour, just--just
for _you_. Did you think of me, I wonder? It was to meet your thoughts
that I went, dear dearest.

How clever these sketches are. The expression produced by such
apparently inadequate means is quite striking; and I have been making
my brothers admire them, and they 'wonder you don't think of employing
them in an illustrated edition of your works.' Which might be, really!
Ah, you did not ask for 'Luria'! Not that I should have let you have
it!--I think I should not indeed. Dearest, you take care of the head
... and don't make that tragedy of the soul one for mine, by letting
it make you ill. Beware too of the shower-bath--it plainly does not
answer for you at this season. And walk, and think of me for _your_
good, if such a combination should be possible.

And _I_ think of _you_ ... if I do not of Italy. Yet I forget to speak
to you of the Dulwich Gallery. I never saw those pictures, but am
astonished that the whole world should be wrong in praising them.
'Divine' is a bad word for Murillo in any case--because he is
intensely human in his most supernatural subjects. His beautiful
Trinity in the National Gallery, which I saw the last time I went out
to look at pictures, has no deity in it--and I seem to see it now. And
do you remember the visitation of the angels to Abraham (the Duke of
Sutherland's picture--is it not?) where the mystic visitors look like
shepherds who had not even dreamt of God? But I always understood that
that Dulwich Gallery was famous for great works--you surprise me! And
for painters ... their badness is more ostentatious than that of
poets--they stare idiocy out of the walls, and set the eyes of
sensitive men on edge. For the rest, however, I very much doubt
whether they wear their lives more to rags, than writers who mistake
their vocation in poetry do. There is a mechanism in poetry as in the
other art--and, to men not native to the way of it, it r