it was a very happy picture of English life. Alas! that there are
not larger districts where it exists! But I hope there is still much
of it; and I feel that while there is an awful undercurrent of
misery and sin--the latter both caused by the first and causing
it--and while, on the surface, there is carelessness, and often
recklessness and hardness and trifling, yet that still, in our
English society, there is, between these two extremes, a strength
of good mixed with baser elements, which must and will, I fully
believe, support us nationally in the troublous times which are
at hand--on which we are actually entered.

But again I am wandering, and now the others have gone off to the
Rydal Chapel without me this lovely Sunday morning. There are the
bells sounding invitingly across the valley, and the evergreens
are white and sparkling in the sun.

I have a note from Clough.... His poem is as remarkable, I think,
as you would expect, coming from him. Its _power_ quite overcame
my dislike to the measure--so far at least as to make me read it
with great interest--often, though, a painful one. And now I
must end.

As to Miss Bronte's impressions of Matthew Arnold in that same afternoon
call of 1850, they were by no means flattering. She understands that he
was already the author of "a volume of poems" (_The Poems by A,_ 1849),
remarks that his manner "displeases from its seeming foppery," but
recognizes, nevertheless, in conversation with him, "some genuine
intellectual aspirations"! It was but a few years later that my uncle
paid his poet's homage to the genius of the two sisters--to Charlotte of
the "expressive gray eyes"--to Emily of the "chainless soul." I often