Neither indolence nor procrastination have had any place among the causes of my silence, least of all either yourself, or the subject of your letter, or the purpose of answering it, having been absent from my thoughts. You may with almost literal truth attribute it to want of time, from the number, quantity, and quality of my engagements, the necessity of several journeys _to_ and (still worse) _in_ town being the largest waster of time and spirits. At length I have settled J. for the next six or eight weeks with Mr. Montague, where he is engaged on an _Essay on the Principles of Taste in relation to Metre and Rhythm_, containing, first, a new scheme of prosody, as applied to the choral and lyrical stanzas of the Greek drama; secondly, the possibility of improving and enriching our English versification by digging in the original mines, viz.--the tunes of nature and impassioned conversation, both of which may be illustrated from Mr. Frere's _Aristophanic Poems_. I have been working hard to bring together for him the notes, etc., that I had prepared on this subject. E. has been ill, and even now is far from well. There are some persons--I have known several--who, when they find themselves uncomfortable, take up the pen and transfer as much discomfort as they can to their absent friends. But I know only one of this sort, who, as soon as they take up the pen, instantly become _dolorous_, however smug, snug, and cheerful the minute before and the minute after. Now just such is Mrs. D., God bless her! and she has been writing letter after letter to E. about J., and every discomfortable recollection and anticipation that she could conjure up, that she has completely overset him. _This must not be._ Mr. Gillman, too, has been _out_ of _sorts_, but at this present we are all better. I at least am as well as I ever am, and my regular employment, in which Mr. Green is weekly my amanuensis, the work on the books of the Old and New Testaments introduced by the assumptions and postulates required as the pre-conditions of a fair examination of Christianity as a scheme of doctrines, precepts, and histories, drawn or at least deducible from these books. And now, in the narrative line, I have only to add that Mrs. Gillman desires to be affectionately remembered to you, and bids me entreat you to stay _away as long_ as you possibly can, provided it be from _London_ as well as from Highgate. Would to heaven I were with you! In a few days you should see that the spirit of the mountaineer is not yet utterly extinct in me. Wordsworth has remarked (in the _Brothers_, I believe), The thought of death sits light upon the man That has been bred, and dies among the mountains.