Monday.—­Never too early can the light come.  Thank you for my letter!  Yet you look askance at me over ‘newt and toad,’ and praise so the Elf-story that I am ashamed to send you my ill humour on the same head.  And you really like that? admire it?  Grandmama Grey and the night cap and all? and ‘shoetye and blue sky?’ and is it really wrong of me to like certainly some touches and images, but not the whole, ... not the poem as a whole?  I can take delight in the fantastical, and in the grotesque—­but here there is a want of life and consistency, as it seems to me!—­the elf is no elf and speaks no elf-tongue:  it is not the right key to touch, ... this, ... for supernatural music.  So I fancy at least—­but I will try the poem again presently.  You must be right—­unless it should be your over-goodness opposed to my over-badness—­I will not be sure.  Or you wrote perhaps in an accidental mood of most excellent critical smoothness, such as Mr. Forster did his last Examiner in, when he gave the all-hail to Mr. Harness as one of the best dramatists of the age!!  Ah no!—­not such as Mr. Forster’s.  Your soul does not enter into his secret—­There can be nothing in common between you.  For him to say such a word—­he who knows—­or ought to know!—­And now let us agree and admire the bowing of the old ministrel over Bedd Gelert’s unfilled grave—­

The long beard fell like snow into the grave
With solemn grace

A poet, a friend, a generous man Mr. Horne is, even if no laureate for the fairies.

I have this moment a parcel of books via Mr. Moxon—­Miss Martineau’s two volumes—­and Mr. Bailey sends his ‘Festus,’ very kindly, ... and ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century’ from America from a Mrs. or a Miss Fuller—­how I hate those ‘Women of England,’ ‘Women and their Mission’ and the rest.  As if any possible good were to be done by such expositions of rights and wrongs.

Your letter would be worth them all, if you were less you!  I mean, just this letter, ... all alive as it is with crawling buzzing wriggling cold-blooded warm-blooded creatures ... as all alive as your own pedant’s book in the tree.  And do you know, I think I like frogs too—­particularly the very little leaping frogs, which are so high-hearted as to emulate the birds.  I remember being scolded by my nurses for taking them up in my hands and letting them leap from one hand to the other.  But for the toad!—­why, at the end of the row of narrow beds which we called our gardens when we were children, grew an old thorn, and in the hollow of the root of the thorn, lived a toad, a great ancient toad, whom I, for one, never dared approach too nearly.  That he ‘wore a jewel in his head’ I doubted nothing at all.  You must see it glitter if you stooped and looked steadily into the hole.  And on days when he came out and sate swelling his black sides, I never looked steadily; I would run a hundred yards round through the shrubs, deeper than knee-deep in the long wet grass and nettles, rather than go past him where he sate; being steadily of opinion, in the profundity of my natural history-learning, that if he took it into his toad’s head to spit at me I should drop down dead in a moment, poisoned as by one of the Medici.