He was in Whitby again in August, living as he liked so well now to do with his books and letters and few friends and the walks which were little more than easy strolls. He wrote to his friend Mrs. Leslie Stephen who was at St. Ives in Cornwall: “I am still pretty lame (do you know I begin to think that I am really seventy at last, and not playing that I am) and can take only short walks. But I hope that the air here will gradually blow the years out of me again. And the fish diet, too, a far more invigorating animal here than in your sleepy Southern waters which have done nothing but sun themselves and doze since Sir Cloudesley Shovel’s days. What are your pilchards when you contrive to catch ’em, and your gurnards (of which latter indeed nothing is left but a petrified head fit only for the table of a geologist that ever I heard of) to our cod and whiting and ling, to speak of no others, with their flesh hardened by constant struggle with our cold Northern waters? Why, your poor fellows have to come all the way hither to catch even a herring, while we have them fresh from the sea every morning. I wish I could send you a few as we know them. And where is your Abbey? We are under the special protection of B. V. Sanctæ Hildæ with the added flavor in our prayers that she was a king’s daughter and therefore of our set, and with that sympathy for our special infirmities that comes of knowledge. If you have any saint ’tis some fellow with a name you can’t pronounce, and who understands nothing but Cornish, whereas Hilda spoke English, as Freeman has proved over and over again.” To Mr. Norton, who had been advising with him on some points in the translation of Dante, he wrote from Whitby: “You put me some pretty stiff conundrums, but I will try.... The swoon at the end of the canto (Inferno III.) is a nut too hard for my hammer. I have turned it and tapped it on every corner that seemed hopeful without making so much as a crack in it. Tambernic and Pietrapana might fall on it in vain. I must have expressed myself clumsily in my last letter. I did not mean to counsel paraphrase in the text, but at foot of page for the help of the Philistine to whom all poetry is a dead language. At best the translation of a poem is a waxen image of the living original, and being too literal is to dress it in the very clothes it wore as if the reality were in them. “I do not know whether I told you that my last attack of gout had left me more infirm than ever before. I am still lame in both feet, though I insist on walking in the hope of getting limber and because without exercise I can’t sleep. We have had disastrous weather here, a cold of Antenora, with fierce winds to drive it in. Even the stones of the Abbey seem to feel it and shudder. I am sitting by a fire as I write. For the first time I begin to think myself capable of growing old.[104]