to disturb it, but the delight and gratitude! You have made me as
happy as I was as a child with the Arabian Nights,--every step I have
walked in Elfland has been a sort of Paradise to me. (The landlord
gave TWO bottles of his claret and I think I drank the most) and here
I have been lying back in the chair and thinking of those delightful
Idylls, my thoughts being turned to you: what could I do but be
grateful to that surprising genius which has made me so happy? Do
you understand that what I mean is all true, and that I should break
out were you sitting opposite with a pipe in your mouth? Gold and
purple and diamonds, I say, gentlemen, and glory and love and honour,
and if you haven't given me all these why should I be in such an
ardour of gratitude? But I have had out of that dear book the
greatest delight that has ever come to me since I was a young man; to
write and think about it makes me almost young, and this I suppose is
what I'm doing, like an after-dinner speech.

P.S.--I thought the "Grandmother" quite as fine. How can you at 50
be doing things as well as at 35?

October 16th.--(I should think six weeks after the writing of the
above.)

The rhapsody of gratitude was never sent, and for a peculiar reason:
just about the time of writing I came to an arrangement with Smith &
Elder to edit their new magazine, and to have a contribution from T.
was the publishers' and editor's highest ambition. But to ask a man
for a favour, and to praise and bow down before him in the same page,
seemed to be so like hypocrisy, that I held my hand, and left this
note in my desk, where it has been lying during a little French-
Italian-Swiss tour which my girls and their papa have been making.