Through the summer he was occupied with fitting up his new residence,selecting governesses,servants;earnestly endeavoring to set his house in order,on the new footing it had now assumed.Extensive improvements in his garden and grounds,in which he took due interest to the last,were also going on.His Brother,and Mr.Maurice his brother-in-law,--especially Mrs.Maurice the kind sister,faithfully endeavoring to be as a mother to her poor little nieces,--were occasionally with him.All hours available for labor on his literary tasks,he employed,almost exclusively I believe,on _Coeur-de-Lion_;with what energy,the progress he had made in that Work,and in the art of Poetic composition generally,amid so many sore impediments,best testifies.I perceive,his life in general lay heavier on him than it had done before;his mood of mind is grown more sombre;--indeed the very solitude of this Ventnor as a place,not to speak of other solitudes,must have been new and depressing.But he admits no hypochondria,now or ever;occasionally,though rarely,even flashes of a kind of wild gayety break through.He works steadily at his task,with all the strength left him;endures the past as he may,and makes gallant front against the world."I am going on quietly here,rather than happily,"writes he to his friend Newman;"sometimes quite helpless,not from distinct illness,but from sad thoughts and a ghastly dreaminess.The heart is gone out of my life.My children,however,are doing well;and the place is cheerful and mild."From Letters of this period I might select some melancholy enough;but will prefer to give the following one (nearly the last I can give),as indicative of a less usual temper:--"_To Thomas Carlyle,Esq.,Chelsea,London_.
"VENTNOR,7th December,1843.
"MY DEAR CARLYLE,--My Irish Newspaper was _not_meant as a hint that Iwanted a Letter.It contained an absurd long Advertisement,--some project for regenerating human knowledge,&c.&c.;to which I prefixed my private mark (a blot),thinking that you might be pleased to know of a fellow-laborer somewhere in Tipperary.
"Your Letter,like the Scriptural oil,--(they had no patent lamps then,and used the best oil,7s.per gallon),--has made my face to shine.There is but one person in the world,I shall not tell you who,from whom a Letter would give me so much pleasure.It would be nearly as good at Pekin,in the centre of the most enlightened Mandarins;but here at Ventnor,where there are few Mandarins and no enlightenment,--fountains in the wilderness,even were they miraculous,are nothing compared with your handwriting.Yet it is sad that you should be so melancholy.I often think that though Mercury was the pleasanter fellow,and probably the happier,Saturn was the greater god;--rather cannibal or so,but one excuses it in him,as in some other heroes one knows of.
"It is,as you say,your destiny to write about Cromwell:and you will make a book of him,at which the ears of our grandchildren will tingle;--and as one may hope that the ears of human nature will be growing longer and longer,the tingling will be proportionately greater than we are accustomed to.Do what you can,I fear there will be little gain from the Royalists.There is something very small about the biggest of them that I have ever fallen in with,unless you count old Hobbes a Royalist.
"Curious to see that you have them exactly preserved in the Country Gentlemen of our day;while of the Puritans not a trace remains except in History.Squirism had already,in that day,become the _caput mortuum_that it is now;and has therefore,like other mummies,been able to last.What was opposed to it was the Life of Puritanism,--then on the point of disappearing;and it too has left its mummy at Exeter Hall on the platform and elsewhere.One must go back to the Middle Ages to see Squirism as rampant and vivacious as Biblicism was in the Seventeenth Century:and I suppose our modern Country Gentlemen are about as near to what the old Knights and Barons were who fought the Crusades,as our modern Evangelicals to the fellows who sought the Lord by the light of their own pistol-shots.
"Those same Crusades are now pleasant matter for me.You remember,or perhaps you do not,a thing I once sent you about Coeur-de-Lion.Long since,I settled to make the Cantos you saw part of a larger Book;and worked at it,last autumn and winter,till I had a bad illness.I am now at work on it again;and go full sail,like _my_hero.There are six Cantos done,roughly,besides what you saw.I have struck out most of the absurdest couplets,and given the whole a higher though still sportive tone.It is becoming a kind of _Odyssey_,with a laughing and Christian Achilles for hero.One may manage to wrap,in that chivalrous brocade,many things belonging to our Time,and capable of interesting it.The thing is not bad;but will require great labor.Only it is labor that I thoroughly like;and which keeps the maggots out of one's brain,until their time.
"I have never spoken to you,never been able to speak to you,of the change in my life,--almost as great,one fancies,as one's own death.
Even now,although it seems as if I had so much to say,I cannot.If one could imagine--...But it is no use;I cannot write wisely on this matter.I suppose no human being was ever devoted to another more entirely than she;and that makes the change not less but more bearable.It seems as if she could not be gone quite;and that indeed is my faith.
