’At least you will accept a division of the
property, Harry. It should be yours. It
is an excess, and I feel it a snare to me. I was
a selfish child: I may not become an estimable
woman. You have not pardoned my behaviour at
the island last year, and I cannot think I was wrong:
perhaps I might learn: I want your friendship
and counsel. Aunty will live with me: she
says that you would complete us. At any rate I
transfer Riversley to you. Send me your consent.
Papa will have it before the transfer is signed.’
The letter ended with an adieu, a petition for an
answer, and ’yours affectionately.’
On the day of its date, a Viennese newspaper lying
on the Salzburg Hotel table chronicled Ottilia’s
marriage with Prince Hermann.
I turned on Temple to walk him off his legs if I could.
Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased
not to sit down in sight of them ruminating, for bodily
ease and comfort will trick the soul and set you measuring
our lean humanity against yonder sublime and infinite;
but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the
peaks; taste danger, sweat, earn rest: learn
to discover ungrudgingly that haggard fatigue is the
fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest is
your uttermost reward. Would you know what it
is to hope again, and have all your hopes at hand?—hang
upon the crags at a gradient: that makes your
next step a debate between the thing you are and the
thing you may become. There the merry little
hopes grow for the climber like flowers and food,
immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient:
if just within the grasp, as mortal hopes should be.
How the old lax life closes in about you there!
You are the man of your faculties, nothing more.
Why should a man pretend to more? We ask it wonderingly
when we are healthy. Poetic rhapsodists in the
vales below may tell you of the joy and grandeur of
the upper regions, they cannot pluck you the medical
herb. He gets that for himself who wanders the
marshy ledge at nightfall to behold the distant Sennhiittchen
twinkle, who leaps the green-eyed crevasses, and in
the solitude of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand
to the mountain kine.
MY RETURN TO ENGLAND
I passed from the Alps to the desert, and fell in
love with the East, until it began to consume me.
History, like the air we breathe, must be in motion
to keep us uncorrupt: otherwise its ancient homes
are infectious. My passion for the sun and his
baked people lasted awhile, the drudgery of the habit
of voluntary exile some time longer, and then, quite
unawares, I was seized with a thirst for England, so
violent that I abandoned a correspondence of several
months, lying for me both at Damascus and Cairo, to
catch the boat for Europe. A dream of a rainy
morning, in the midst of the glowing furnace, may have
been the origin of the wild craving I had for my native
