Hortus Inclusus Part 14

Here's your lovely note just come. I am very thankful that the "Venice" gives you so much pleasure.

I _have_, at least, one certainty, which few authors could hold so surely, that no one was ever harmed by a book of mine; they may have been offended, but have never been discouraged or discomforted, still less corrupted.

_There's_ a saucy speech for Susie's friend. You won't like me any more if I begin to talk like that.

A sapphire is the same stone as a ruby; both are the pure earth of clay crystallized. No one knows why one is red and the other blue.

A diamond is pure _coal_ crystallized.

An opal, pure flint--in a state of fixed _jelly_.

I'm in a great pa.s.sion with the horrid people who write letters to tease my good little Susie. _I won't have it._ She shall have some more stones to-morrow.

I must have a walk to-day, and can't give account of them, but I've looked them out. It's so very nice that you like stones. If my father, when I was a little boy, would only have given me stones for bread, how I should have thanked him.

What infinite power and treasure you have in being able thus to enjoy the least things, yet having at the same time all the fastidiousness of taste and imagination which lays hold of what is greatest in the least, and best in all things!

Never hurt your eyes by writing; keep them wholly for admiration and wonder. I hope to write little more myself of books, and to join with you in joy over crystals and flowers in the way we used to do when we were both more children than we are.

TO MISS BEEVER.

I am ashamed not to have sent you a word of expression of my real and very deep feelings of regard and respect for you, and of my not _fervent_ (in the usual phrase, which means only hasty and ebullient), but serenely _warm_, hope that you may keep your present power of benevolent happiness to length of many days to come. But I hope you will sometimes take the simpler view of the little agate box than that of birthday token, and that you will wonder sometimes at its labyrinth of mineral vegetable! I a.s.sure you there is nothing in all my collection of agates in its way quite so perfect as the little fiery forests of dotty trees in the corner of the piece which forms the bottom. I ought to have set it in silver, but was always afraid to trust it to a lapidary.

What you say of the Greek want of violets is also very interesting to me, for it is one of my little pet discoveries that Homer means the blue iris by the word translated "violet."

_Thursday morning._

I'm ever so much better, and the jackdaw has come. But why wasn't I there to meet his pathetic desire for art knowledge? To think of that poor bird's genius and love of scarlet ribbons, shut up in a cage!

What it might have come to!

If ever my St. George's schools come to any perfection, they shall have every one a jackdaw to give the children their first lessons in arithmetic. I'm sure he could do it perfectly. "Now, Jack, take two from four, and show them how many are left." "Now, Jack, if you take the teaspoon out of this saucer, and put it into _that_, and then if you take two teaspoons out of two saucers, and put them into this, and then if you take one teaspoon out of this, and put it into that, how many spoons are there in this, and how many in that?"--and so on.

Oh, Susie, when we _do_ get old, you and I, won't we have nice schools for the birds first, and then for the children?

That photograph is indeed like a visit; how thankful I am that it is still my hope to get the real visit some day!

I was yesterday and am always, certainly at present, very unwell, and a mere trouble to my Joanies and Susies and all who care for me. But I'm painting another bit of moss which I think Susie will enjoy, and hope for better times.

Did you see the white cloud that stayed quiet for three hours this morning over the Old Man's summit? It was one of the few remains of the heaven one used to see. The heaven one had a Father in, not a raging enemy.

I send you Rogers' "Italy," that is no more. I do think you'll have pleasure in it.

I've been made so miserable by a paper of Sir J. Lubbock's on flowers and insects, that I must come and whine to you. He says, and really as if he knew it, that insects, chiefly bees, entirely originate flowers; that all scent, color, pretty form, is owing to bees; that flowers which insects don't take care of, have no scent, color, nor honey.

It seems to me, that it is likelier that the flowers which have no scent, color, nor honey, don't get any attention from the bees.

But the man really knows so much about it, and has tried so many pretty experiments, that he makes me miserable.

So I'm afraid you're miserable too. Write to tell me about it all.

It is very lovely of you to send me so sweet a note when I have not been near you since the tenth century. But it is all I can do to get my men and my moor looked after; they have both the instinct of doing what I don't want, the moment my back's turned; and then there has not been light enough to know a hawk from a hand-saw, or a crow from a ptarmigan, or a moor from a meadow. But how much better your eyes must be when you can write such lovely notes!

I don't understand how the strange cat came to love you so quickly, after one dinner and a rest by the fire! I should have thought an ill-treated and outcast animal would have regarded everything as a trap, for a month at least,--dined in tremors, warmed itself with its back to the fire, watching the door, and jumped up the chimney if you stepped on the rug.

If you only knew the good your peac.o.c.k's feathers have done me, and if you could only see the clever drawing I'm making of one from the blue breast! You know what lovely little fern or equisetum stalks of sapphire the filaments are; they beat me so, but they're coming nice.

That is so intensely true what you say about Turner's work being like nature's in its slowness and tenderness. I always think of him as a great natural force in a human frame.

_So_ nice all you say of the "Ethics"! And I'm a monster of ingrat.i.tude, as bad as the Dragon of Wantley. Don't like Dr. Brown's friend's book at all. It's neither Scotch nor English, nor fish nor flesh, and it's tiresome.

I'm in the worst humor I've been in this month, which is saying much; and have been writing the wickedest "Fors" I ever wrote, which is saying more; you will be _so_ angry.

I'm so very glad you will mark the bits you like, but are there not a good many here and there that you _don't_ like?--I mean that sound hard or ironical. Please don't mind them. They're partly because I never count on readers who will really care for the prettiest things, and it gets me into a bad habit of expressing contempt which is not indeed any natural part of my mind.

It pleases me especially that you have read "The Queen of the Air." As far as I know, myself, of my books, it is the most useful and careful piece I have done. But that again--did it not shock you to have a heathen G.o.ddess so much believed in? (I've believed in English ones long ago). If you can really forgive me for "The Queen of the Air,"

there are all sorts of things I shall come begging you to read some day.

_21st July._

I'm always looking at the Thwaite, and thinking how nice it is that you are there. I think it's a little nice, too, that _I'm_ within sight of you, for if I hadn't broken, I don't know how many not exactly promises, but nearly, to be back at Oxford by this time, I might have been dragged from Oxford to London, from London to France, from France who knows where? But I'm here, and settled to produce, as soon as possible, the following works--

1. New number of "Love's Meinie," on the Stormy Petrel.

2. New ditto of "Proserpina," on sap, pith, and bark.

3. New ditto of "Deucalion," on clouds.