Well, having begun at the end of your letter, dearest, I will go back gently (that is backwards) and tell you I ‘sate thinking’ too, and with no greater comfort, on the cold yesterday.  The pond before the window was frozen (’so as to bear sparrows’ somebody said) and I knew you would feel it—­’but you are not unwell’—­really? thank God—­and the month wears on.  Beside I have got a reassurance—­you asked me once if I were superstitious, I remember (as what do I forget that you say?).  However that may be, yesterday morning as I turned to look for a book, an old fancy seized me to try the ‘sortes’ and dip into the first page of the first I chanced upon, for my fortune; I said ’what will be the event of my love for Her’—­in so many words—­and my book turned out to be—­’Cerutti’s Italian Grammar!’—­a propitious source of information ... the best to be hoped, what could it prove but some assurance that you were in the Dative Case, or I, not in the ablative absolute?  I do protest that, with the knowledge of so many horrible pitfalls, or rather spring guns with wires on every bush ... such dreadful possibilities of stumbling on ‘conditional moods,’ ’imperfect tenses,’ ’singular numbers,’—­I should have been too glad to put up with the safe spot for the sole of my foot though no larger than afforded by such a word as ‘Conjunction,’ ‘possessive pronoun—­,’ secure so far from poor Tippet’s catastrophe.  Well, I ventured, and what did I find? This—­which I copy from the book now—­’If we love in the other world as we do in this, I shall love thee to eternity’—­from ‘Promiscuous Exercises,’ to be translated into Italian, at the end.

And now I reach Horne and his characteristics—­of which I can tell you with confidence that they are grossly misrepresented where not altogether false—­whether it proceed from inability to see what one may see, or disinclination, I cannot say.  I know very little of Horne, but my one visit to him a few weeks ago would show the uncandidness of those charges:  for instance, he talked a good deal about horses, meaning to ride in Ireland, and described very cleverly an old hunter he had hired once,—­how it galloped and could not walk; also he propounded a theory of the true method of behaving in the saddle when a horse rears, which I besought him only to practise in fancy on the sofa, where he lay telling it.  So much for professing his ignorance in that matter!  On a sofa he does throw himself—­but when thrown there, he can talk, with Miss Mitford’s leave, admirably,—­I never heard better stories than Horne’s—­some Spanish-American incidents of travel want printing—­or have been printed, for aught I know.  That he cares for nobody’s poetry is false, he praises more unregardingly of his own retreat, more unprovidingly for his own fortune,—­(do I speak clearly?)—­less like a man who himself has written somewhat in the ‘line’ of the other man he is praising—­which ‘somewhat’ has to be guarded in its interests,