Newcastle to give him an opportunity of an interview as the duke passed near Tunbridge on the way to Sussex. Even in this amiable note he allows his pique to be visible for a moment. He entirely agrees with the policy of the brothers, but 'What I think concerning publick affairs can import nothing to any one but myself.'[218] On his recovery he went off on a round of country visits to Stowe, Hagley and Hayes; Hayes, then occupied by Mrs. Montagu, which was destined to be the shrine of his passionate affection. Stowe was a second home to him; there we have seen him play cricket, there he entered with zest into the sumptuous plans of landscape gardening, and even advised on architecture. His delight in Hagley, the seat of his friend Lyttelton, was scarcely less keen. 'My dear Billy,' he writes to William Lyttelton, then travelling in Germany, 'I am going in a few days to follow your brother to Hagley, and with all the respect due to the oaks of Germany, I would not quit the Dryads of your father's woods for all the charms of Westphalia. Io già coi campi Elisi fortunato giardin dei Semidei, la vostra ombra gentil non cangerei. You see, the idea of the Germanick body and the heroes and demigods who compose it have made me very poetical.'[219] He had, we may note, when this letter was written (August 1748), just returned from Tunbridge, and had greatly benefited by his stay there. What, we may ask in passing, has become of the efficacious nymphs of all these wells? Have they lost their virtue, or is it only the necessary faith which has disappeared? From Hagley, Pitt would visit Shenstone at his petty paradise of the Leasowes, and the grateful poet would apostrophise him: 'Ev'n Pitt, whose fervent periods roll Resistless o'er the kindling soul Of Senates, Councils, Kings; Tho' formed for Courts, vouchsafed to move Inglorious thro' the shepherd's grove, And ope his bashful springs.'