cheeks, though often washed them.”  I had heard of Time as the thinner of people’s hair, but never as the washer of their faces.

     Sunday, July 31st.—­Went to church, to St. Sidwell’s....  We had
     another good sermon; that preacher must be a good man, and I should
     like to know him....

Our dinner-party this evening was like nothing but a chapter out of one of Miss Austen’s novels.  What wonderful books those are!  She must have written down the very conversations she heard verbatim, to have made them so like, which is Irish....  How many things one ought to die of and doesn’t!  That dinner did come to an end.  In the drawing-room afterward, in spite of the dreadful heat, two fair female friends actually divided one chair between them; I expected to see them run into one every minute, and kept speculating then which they would be, till the idea fascinated me like a thing in a nightmare.  As we were taking our departure, and had got half way down the stairs, a general rush was made at us, and an attempt, upon some pretext, to get us back into that dreadful drawing-room.  I thought of Malebranche hooking the miserable souls that tried to escape back again into the boiling pitch.  But we got away and safe home, and leave Exeter to-morrow.

                                                EXETER, July 31, 1831. 
     DEAREST H——­,

I am content to be whatever does not militate against your affection for me....  I had a long letter from dear A——­, a day ago, from Weybridge.  She is quite well, and says my mother is as happy as the day is long, now she is once more in her beloved haunts.  I love Weybridge too very much....  It seems to me that memory is the special organ of pain, for even when it recalls our pleasures, it recalls only the past, and half their sweetness becomes bitter in the process.  I have a tenacious and acute memory, and, as the phrenologists affirm, no hope, and feel disposed to lament that, not having both, I have either.  The one seems the necessary counterpoise of the other; the one is the source of most of the pain, as the other is of most of the pleasure, which we derive from the things that are not; and I feel daily more and more my deficiency in the more cheerful attribute....

You have been to the Opera, and seen what even one’s imagination does not shrug its shoulders at; I mean Madame Pasta.  I admire her perfectly, and she seems to me perfect.  How I wish I had been with you!  And yet I cannot fancy you in the Opera House; it is a sort of atmosphere that I find it difficult to think of your breathing....  I wish you had not asked me to write verses for you upon that picture of Haydon’s “Bonaparte at St. Helena.”  Of course, I know it familiarly through the engraving, and, in spite of its sunshine, what a shudder and chill it sends to one’s heart!  It is very striking, but I have neither the strength