s time my odd liking for 'vermin'--you once wrote '_your_
snails'--and certainly snails are old clients of mine--but efts! Horne
traced a line to me--in the rhymes of a ''prentice-hand' I used to
look over and correct occasionally--taxed me (last week) with having
altered the wise line 'Cold as a _lizard_ in a _sunny_ stream' to
'Cold as a newt hid in a shady brook'--for 'what do _you_ know about
newts?' he asked of the author--who thereupon confessed. But never try
and catch a speckled gray lizard when we are in Italy, love, and you
see his tail hang out of the chink of a wall, his
winter-house--because the strange tail will snap off, drop from him
and stay in your fingers--and though you afterwards learn that there
is more desperation in it and glorious determination to be free, than
positive pain (so people say who have no tails to be twisted off)--and
though, moreover, the tail grows again after a sort--_yet_ ... don't
do it, for it will give you a thrill! What a fine fellow our English
water-eft is; 'Triton paludis Linnaei'--_e come guizza_ (_that_ you
can't say in another language; cannot preserve the little in-and-out
motion along with the straightforwardness!)--I always loved all those
wild creatures God '_sets up for themselves_' so independently of us,
so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as
it were, to light them; while we run about and against each other with
our great cressets and fire-pots. I once saw a solitary bee nipping a
leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole; his nest, no
doubt; or tomb, perhaps--'Safe as Oedipus's grave-place, 'mid Colone's
olives swart'--(Kiss me, my Siren!)--Well, it seemed awful to watch
that bee--he seemed so _instantly_ from the teaching of God! AElian
says that ... a _frog_, does he say?--some animal, having to swim
across the Nile, never fails to provide himself with a bit of reed,
which he bites off and holds in his mouth transversely and so puts
from shore gallantly ... because when the water-serpent comes swimming
to meet him, there is the reed, wider than his serpent's jaws, and no
hopes of a swallow that time--now fancy the two meeting heads, the
frog's wide eyes and the vexation of the snake!

Now, see! do I deceive you? Never say I began by letting down my
dignity 'that with no middle flight intends to soar above the Aonian
Mount'!--

My best, dear, dear one,--may you be better, less _depressed_, ... I
can hardly imagine f