I never answer your dear, kind, welcome, and clever
letters at the moment I wish to answer them (which is the moment they are read)
both for your sake and my own, because I wish to delay the moment of bore to you, and to keep in view a pleasure for myself.
To hold intercourse with you of whatever description, has always been to me a
positive enjoyment since the first moment I saw you, and that was not the least
happy moment of my life. I was then full of the spirits which create hope in
the mind. I was beckoned on by a thousand bright illusions, and it was a
delicious event to meet half way in my career such a creature as yourself. In
short, my dear friend, our physical capabilities for receiving pleasure wear
out rapidly in proportion to their own intensity, and those who, like me, see
life through the dazzling prism of imagination long before they are permitted
to enter it, must, like me, find the original infinitely inferior to the
fiction; still I have no reason to complain. I have associated myself to one
who feels and thinks as I do, and this is, or ought to be, the first of human
blessings; but his thoughts and feelings are still of a
higher tone—they are not qualified by that
light vanity which brings my character down to the
general level of hu-
| FIRST YEAR OF MARRIED LIFE. | 9 |
You will laugh at this wife-like letter; but provided you do laugh, I am satisfied. Could you take a peep out of your secluded Eden at the vicissitudes and miseries of those who live in the world, you would hug yourself in your own “home-felt certainty” of peace, comfort, and competency. The worst of all human evils you never can have known—poverty! As Ninon says upon a gayer subject, “On peut s’en rapporter à moi.” I am, however, for the present, living upon fifty thousand pounds a year, and shall do so for another year if I choose; but although our noble hosts are everything that is kind and charming, we prefer a home of our own, be it ever so tiny. Since I wrote to you, we have lost the beautiful Countess of Aberdeen, Lord Abercorn’s favourite daughter. It was a heavy blow.
| 10 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
I am delighted your winter has been cheered by the society of your new son-in-law, and the amiable Emma. My dearest Olivia comes here in June, if her health permits, and after that I must settle in England and she in Ireland. I am at work again; but with the sole view of making some money to furnish a bit of a house in London, which, coûte que coûte, we must have. My book will be a genuine Irish romance of Elizabeth’s day, founded on historic facts. I would not write another line, to add the fame of Sappho to my own little quota of reputation, did not necessity guide my worn out stump of a goose-quill. My imagination is exhausted, and those hopes and views which in the first era of life give such spring to mind, and such energy to thought, are all dead and gone. At present nothing would give me more pleasure than to meet you in London when we go there. We are daily expecting the arrival of Lord Aberdeen and his little daughters, and Lady Marian Hamilton, and shortly Lord and Lady Hamilton and their family, so we shall have a house full; but people are mistaken as to the pleasures of a large society in great houses—there is an inevitability about it that is a dead bore.
I long to hear how the dear little farm is going on, and
all the improvements. Is the pig alive? is Poll as brilliant as ever, and
Mrs. Jones wedded to her sentimental lover? And you? Do you walk about with the little black silk apron
and feed the pets? Pray write to me, and soon—directly; this I ask in the
honesty of earnest wishes. Sir Charles
requests I will say something for him. What can I say, but that he is
| FIRST YEAR OF MARRIED LIFE. | 11 |
