I gaze, and in a calenture can plunge myself into St. Giles's. Oh, let
no native Londoner imagine that health and rest and innocent occupation,
interchange of converse sweet and recreative study, can make the country
anything better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the
primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness luckily
sinned himself out of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice,
London; haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, playhouses, satires,
epigrams, puns,--these all came in on the town part and the thither side
of innocence. Man found out inventions. From my den I return you
condolence for your decaying sight,--not for anything there is to see in
the country, but for the miss of the pleasure of reading a London
newspaper. The poets are as well to listen to; anything high may--nay,
must be read out; you read it to yourself with an imaginary auditor: but
the light paragraphs must be glid over by the proper eye; mouthing
mumbles their gossamery substance. 'Tis these trifles I should mourn in
fading sight. A newspaper is the single gleam of comfort I receive here;
it comes from rich Cathay with tidings of mankind. Yet I could not
attend to it, read out by the most beloved voice. But your eyes do not
get worse, I gather. Oh, for the collyrium of Tobias enclosed in a
whiting's liver, to send you, with no apocryphal good wishes! The last
long time I heard from you, you had knocked your head against something.
Do not do so; for your head (I do not flatter) is not a knob, or the top
of a brass nail, or the end of a ninepin,--unless a Vulcanian hammer
could fairly batter a "Recluse" out of it; then would I bid the smirched
god knock, and knock lustily, the two-handed skinker! Mary must squeeze
out a line _propriá manu_; but indeed her fingers have been incorrigibly
nervous to letter-writing for a long interval. 'T will please you all to
hear that, though I fret like a lion in a net, her present health and
spirits are better than they have been for some time past; she is
absolutely three years and a half younger, as I tell her, since we have