t does with everybody. All goes on precisely as usual
with me; my life is exceedingly uniform, and it is seldom that
anything occurs to disturb its monotonous routine. My dear father,
thank Heaven, is better, but still very weak, and I fear it will be
yet some time before he recovers his strength. He came down to
dinner to-day for the first time in this fortnight; indeed, it is
only since the day before yesterday that he has left his bed; but I
trust that this attack will serve him for a long time, and that
with rest and quiet he will regain his strength.

I am really glad my aunt Kemble is better, though I remember having
some not unpleasant ideas as to how, if she were not, you would go
to Leamington to nurse her, and so come on and stay with us in
London; but I cannot wish it at the price of her prolonged
indisposition, poor woman!... I am sorry to say my father is
pronounced worse to-day; he has a bad side-ache, and they are
applying mustard poultices to overcome it. There is some
apprehension of a return of fever. This is a real and terrible
anxiety, dear H----. The theater, too, is going on very ill, and he
is unable to give it any assistance; and for the same reason I can
do nothing for it, for all my plays require him, except Isabella
and Fazio, and these are worn threadbare. It is all very gloomy;
but, however, time doth not stand still, and will some day come to
the end of the journey with us.... You say Undine reminds you of
me.... The feeling of an existence more closely allied to the
elements of the material universe than even we acknowledge our
dust-formed bodies to be, possesses me sometimes almost like a
little bit of magnus; bright colors, fleeting lights and shadows,
flowers, and above all water, the pure, sparkling, harmonious,
powerful element, excite in me a feeling of intimate fellowship, of
love, almost greater than any human companionship does. Perhaps,
after all, I am only an animated morsel of my palace, this
wonderful, beautiful world. Do you not believe in numberless,
invisible existences, filling up the vast intermediate distance
between God and ourselves, in the lonely and lovely haunts of
nature and her more awful and gloomy recesses? It seems as if one
must be surrounded by them; I do not mean to the point of merely