My Own Beloved: And I never thanked you yesterday for your dear words

about the resurrection pie; that comes of quarreling! Well, you must prove

them and come quickly that I may see this restoration of health and

spirits that you assure me of. You avoid saying that they sent you to

sleep; but I suppose that is what you mean.

Fate meant me only to light upon gay things this morning: listen to this

and guess where it comes from: "When March with variant winds was past,

And April had with her silver showers

Ta'en leif at life with an orient blast;

And lusty May, that mother of flowers,

Had made the birds to begin their hours,

Among the odours ruddy and white,

Whose harmony was the ear's delight: "In bed at morrow I sleeping lay;

Methought Aurora, with crystal een,

In at the window looked by day,

And gave me her visage pale and green;

And on her hand sang a lark from the splene,

'Awake ye lovers from slumbering!

See how the lusty morrow doth spring!'"

Ah, but you are no scholar of the things in your own tongue! That is

Dunbar, a Scots poet contemporary of Henry VII., just a little bit

altered by me to make him soundable to your ears. If I had not had to

leave an archaic word here and there, would you ever have guessed he lay

outside this century? That shows the permanent element in all good

poetry, and in all good joy in things also. In the four centuries since

that was written we have only succeeded in worsening the meaning of

certain words, as for instance "spleen," which now means irritation and

vexation, but stood then for quite the opposite--what we should call, I

suppose, "a full heart." It is what I am always saying--a good digestion

is the root of nearly all the good living and high thinking we are

capable of: and the spleen was then the root of the happy emotions as it

is now of the miserable ones. Your pre-Reformation lark sang from "a

full stomach," and thanked God it had a constitution to carry it off

without affectation: and your nineteenth century lark applying the same

code of life, his plain-song is mere happy everyday prose, and not

poetry at all as we try to make it out to be.

I have no news for you at all of anyone: all inside the house is a

simmer of peace and quiet, with blinds drawn down against the heat the

whole day long. No callers; and as for me, I never call elsewhere. The

gossips about here eke out a precarious existence by washing each

other's dirty linen in public: and the process never seems to result in

any satisfactory cleansing.




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