writing, and sorting of old documents and recollections;
summoning out again into clearness old scenes that had now closed
on me without return. Sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a
kind of _worship;_ the only _devout_ time I had had for a great
while past. These things I have half or wholly the intention to
burn out of the way before I myself die:--but such continues
still mainly my employment,--so many hours every forenoon; what
I call the "work" of my day;--to me, if to no other, it is
useful; to reduce matters to writing means that you shall know
them, see them in their origins and sequences, in their essential
lineaments, considerably better than you ever did before. To set
about writing my own _Life_ would be no less than horrible to me;
and shall of a certainty never be done. The common impious
vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me? Let
dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant azure of Eternity
swallow _me;_ for my share of it, that, verily, is the
handsomest, or one handsome way, of settling my poor account with
the _canaille_ of mankind extant and to come. "Immortal glory,"
is not that a beautiful thing, in the Shakespeare Clubs and
Literary Gazettes of our improved Epoch?--I did not leave London,
except for fourteen days in August, to a fine and high old Lady-
friend's in Kent; where, riding about the woods and by the sea-
beaches and chalk cliffs, in utter silence, I felt sadder than
ever, though a little less _miserably_ so, than in the intrusive
babblements of London, which I could not quite lock out of doors.
We read, at first, Tennyson's _Idyls,_ with profound recognition
of the finely elaborated execution, and also of the inward
perfection of _vacancy,_--and, to say truth, with considerable
impatience at being treated so very like infants, though the
lollipops were so superlative. We gladly changed for one