after another; therefore don't talk foolishly with your mouth any
more about getting liberty by being ill and going south VIA the
sickbed. It is not the old free-born bird that gets thus to
freedom; but I know not what manacled and hide-bound spirit,
incapable of pleasure, the clay of a man. Go south! Why, I saw
more beauty with my eyes healthfully alert to see in two wet windy
February afternoons in Scotland than I can see in my beautiful
olive gardens and grey hills in a whole week in my low and lost
estate, as the Shorter Catechism puts it somewhere. It is a
pitiable blindness, this blindness of the soul; I hope it may not
be long with me. So remember to keep well; and remember rather
anything than not to keep well; and again I say, ANYTHING rather
than not to keep well.

Not that I am unhappy, mind you. I have found the words already -
placid and inert, that is what I am. I sit in the sun and enjoy
the tingle all over me, and I am cheerfully ready to concur with
any one who says that this is a beautiful place, and I have a
sneaking partiality for the newspapers, which would be all very
well, if one had not fallen from heaven and were not troubled with
some reminiscence of the INEFFABLE AURORE.

To sit by the sea and to be conscious of nothing but the sound of
the waves, and the sunshine over all your body, is not unpleasant;
but I was an Archangel once.

FRIDAY. - If you knew how old I felt! I am sure this is what age
brings with it - this carelessness, this disenchantment, this
continual bodily weariness. I am a man of seventy: O Medea, kill
me, or make me young again!