giving you this commission. I require only rural exertions, walks, and circuitous wanderings, some slight negotiations about the letting of a house-the superintendence of a disorderly garden, some palings to be mended, some books to be removed and set up.

"I wish you would get all my books and all my furniture from Bishopgate, and all other effects appertaining to me. I have written to secure all that belongs to me

to

there to you.

I have written also to L-- to give up possession of the house on the third of August.

66

When you have possessed yourself of all my affairs, I wish you to look out for a home for me and Mary and William, and the kitten who is now en pension. I wish you to get an unfurnished house, with as good a garden as may be, near Windsor Forest, and take a lease of it for fourteen or twenty-one years. The house must not be too small. I wish the situation to resemble as nearly as possible that of Bishopgate, and should think that Sunning Hill or Winkfield Plain, or the neighbourhood of Virginia Waters, would afford some possibilities.

"Houses are now exceedingly cheap and plentiful; but I entrust the whole of this affair entirely to your own discretion.

“I shall hear from you, of course, as to what you have done on this subject, and shall not delay to remit you whatever expenses you may find it necessary to incur. Perhaps, however, you had better sell the useless part of the Bishopgate furniture-I mean those odious curtains, &c.

I

"Will you write to L- to tell him that you are authorised on my part to go over the inventory with Lady L-'s people on the third of August, if they please, and to make whatever arrangements may be requisite. should be content with the Bishopgate house, dear as it is, if Lady L would make the sale of it a post obit transaction. I merely suggest this, that if you see any possibility of proposing such an arrangement with effect, you might do it.

My present intention is to return to England, and to make that most excellent of nations my perpetual resting place. I think it is extremely probable that we shall return next spring-per

haps before, perhaps after, but certainly we shall

return.

"On the motives and on the consequences of this journey, I reserve much explanation for some future winter walk or summer expedition. This much alone is certain, that before we return we shall have seen, and felt, and heard, a multiplicity of things which will haunt our talk and make us a little better worth knowing than we were before our departure.

"If possible, we think of descending the Danube in a boat, of visiting Constantinople and Athens, then Rome and the Tuscan cities, and returning by the south of France, always following great rivers. The Danube, the Po, the Rhone and the Garonne; rivers are not like roads, the work of the hands of man; they imitate mind, which wanders at will over pathless deserts, and flows through nature's loveliest recesses, which are inaccessible to anything besides. They have the viler advantage also of affording a cheaper mode of conveyance.

"This eastern scheme is one which has just seized on our imaginations. I fear that the detail of execution will destroy it, as all other

wild and beautiful visions; but at all events you will hear from us wherever we are, and to whatever adventures destiny enforces us.

What

"Tell me in return all English news. has become of my poem ?* I hope it has already sheltered itself in the bosom of its mother, Oblivion, from whose embraces no one could have been so barbarous as to tear it except me.

"Tell me of the political state of England. Its literature, of which when I speak Coleridge is in my thoughts;-yourself, lastly your own employments, your historical labours.

"I had written thus far when your letter to Mary, dated the 8th, arrived. What you say of Bishopgate of course modifies that part of this letter which relates to it. I confess I did not learn the destined ruin without some pain, but it is well for me perhaps that a situation requiring so large an expense should be placed beyond our hopes.

"You must shelter my roofless Penates, dedicate some new temple to them, and perform the functions of a priest in my absence. They are innocent deities, and their worship neither sanguinary nor absurd.

* Queen Mab.

"Leave Mammon and Jehovah to those who delight in wickedness and slavery-their altars are stained with blood, or polluted with gold, the price of blood. But the shrines of the Penates are good wood fires, or window frames intertwined with creeping plants; their hymns are the purring of kittens, the hissing of kettles; the long talks over the past and dead; the laugh of children; the warm wind of summer filling the quiet house, and the pelting storm of winter struggling in vain for entrance. In talking of the Penates, will you not liken me to Julius. Cæsar dedicating a temple to Liberty?

"As I have said in the former part of my letter, I trust entirely to your discretion on the subject of a house. Certainly the Forest engages my preference, because of the sylvan nature of the place, and the beasts with which it is filled. But I am not insensible to the beauties of the Thames, and any extraordinary eligibility of situation you mention in your letter would overbalance our habitual affection for the neighbourhood of Bishopgate.

"Its proximity to the spot you have chosen is an argument with us in favour of the Thames.