the same footsteps on the ground, that it is not wonderful I should look down there at any approach of a [Greek:  philia taxis] whatever to this personal me.  Have I not been ground down to browns and blacks? and is it my fault if I am not green?  Not that it is my complaint—­I should not be justified in complaining; I believe, as I told you, that there is more gladness than sadness in the world—­that is, generally:  and if some natures have to be refined by the sun, and some by the furnace (the less genial ones) both means are to be recognised as good, ... however different in pleasurableness and painfulness, and though furnace-fire leaves scorched streaks upon the fruit.  I assured you there was nothing I had any power of teaching you:  and there is nothing, except grief!—­which I would not teach you, you know, if I had the occasion granted.

It is a multitude of words about nothing at all, ... this—­but I am like Mariana in the moated grange and sit listening too often to the mouse in the wainscot.  Be as forbearing as you can—­and believe how profoundly it touches me that you should care to come here at all, much more, so often! and try to understand that if I did not write as you half asked, it was just because I failed at the moment to get up enough pomp and circumstance to write on purpose to certify the important fact of my being a little stronger or a little weaker on one particular morning.  That I am always ready and rejoiced to write to you, you know perfectly well, and I have proved, by ’superfluity of naughtiness’ and prolixity through some twenty posts:—­and this, and therefore, you will agree altogether to attribute no more to me on these counts, and determine to read me no more backwards with your Hebrew, putting in your own vowel points without my leave!  Shall it be so?

Here is a letter grown from a note which it meant to be—­and I have been interrupted in the midst of it, or it should have gone to you earlier.  Let what I have said in it of myself pass unquestioned and unnoticed, because it is of me and not of you, ... and, if in any wise lunatical, all the talking and writing in the world will not put the implied moon into another quarter.  Only be patient with me a little, ... and let us have a smooth ground for the poems which I am foreseeing the sight of with such pride and delight—­Such pride and delight!

And one thing ... which is chief, though it seems to come last!... you will have advice (will you not?) if that pain does not grow much better directly?  It cannot be prudent or even safe to let a pain in the head go on so long, and no remedy be attempted for it, ... and you cannot be sure that it is a merely nervous pain and that it may not have consequences; and this, quite apart from the consideration of suffering.  So you will see some one with an opinion to give, and take it? Do, I beseech you.  You will not say ‘no’?  Also ... if on Wednesday you should be less well than usual, you will come on Thursday instead, I hope, ... seeing that it must be right for you to be quiet and silent when you suffer so, and a journey into London can let you be neither.  Otherwise, I hold to my day, ...  Wednesday.  And may God bless you my dear friend.