My Dear Mrs. Wordsworth,—­I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter.  My sister should more properly have done it; but she having failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts.  I am now trying to do it in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia, cardamoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections.  The reason why I cannot write letters at home is that I am never alone.  Plato’s—­(I write to W.W. now)—­Plato’s double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in the system of its first creation than I sometimes do to be but for a moment single and separate.  Except my morning’s walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so.  I cannot walk home from office, but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me.  All the morning I am pestered.  I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or compare sum with sum, and write “paid” against this, and “unpaid” against t’other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind “some darling thoughts all my own,”—­faint memory of some passage in a book, or the tone of an absent friend’s voice,—­a snatch of Miss Burrell’s singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly’s divine plain face.  The two operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as the sun’s two motions (earth’s I mean); or as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlor, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or as the shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney.  But there are a set of amateurs of the Belies Lettres,—­the gay science,—­who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, etc.,—­what Coleridge said at the lecture last night,—­who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible use reading can be to them but to talk of, might as well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should find it.  These pests worrit me at business and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come to an amicable compromise but for them.  Their noise ended, one of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a moment.  He at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go, mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication:  knock at the door!  In comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Martin Burney, or Morgan Demi-gorgon, [1] or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone,—­a process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion.  Oh, the pleasure