Your letter dated from the Eternal City on the 15th of May reached me here two days ago. Perhaps you have by this time left Naples to which you bid me direct: or will have left it by the time my letter gets there. . . . Our letters are dated from two very different kinds of places: but perhaps equally well suited to the genius of the two men. For I am becoming more hebete every hour: and have not even the ambition to go up to London all this spring to see the Exhibitions, etc. I live in general quietly at my brother-in-law's in Norfolk {67} and I look with tolerable composure on vegetating there for some time to come, and in due time handing out my eldest nieces to waltz, etc., at the County Balls. People affect to talk of this kind of life as very beautiful and philosophical: but I don't: men ought to have an ambition to stir, and travel, and fill their heads and senses: but so it is. Enough of what is now generally called the subjective style of writing. This word has made considerable progress in England during the year you have been away, so that people begin to fancy they understand what it means. I have been striving at it, because it is a very _sine qua non_ condition in a book which I have just been reading, Eastlake's translation of Goethe's Theory of Colours. I recommend it to you, when you can get hold of it. Come back to England quick and read my copy. Goethe is all in opposition to Newton: and reduces the primitive colours to two. Whewell, I believe, does not patronise it: but it is certainly very Baconically put together. While you are wandering among ruins, waterfalls, and temples, and contemplating them as you sit in your lodgings, I poke about with a book and a colour- box by the side of the river Ouse--quiet scenery enough--and make horrible sketches. The best thing to me in Italy would be that you are there. But I hope you will soon come home and install yourself again in Mornington Crescent. I have just come from Leamington: while there, I met Alfred by chance: we made two or three pleasant excursions together: to Stratford upon Avon and Kenilworth, etc. Don't these names sound very thin amid your warm southern nomenclature? But I'll be bound you would be pleased to exchange all your fine burnt up places for a look at a Warwickshire pasture every now and then during these hot days. . . .