The Upton Letters | Page 2

imagine that when the place is once fixed, you will be able
to live a much freer life than you have of late been obliged to live in
England, with less risk and less overshadowing of anxiety. If you can
find the right region, renovabitur ut acquila juventus tua; and you will
be able to carry out some of the plans which have been so often
interrupted here. Of course there will be drawbacks. Books, society,
equal talk, the English countryside which you love so well, and, if I
may use the expression, so intelligently; they will all have to be
foregone in a measure. But fortunately there is no difficulty about
money, and money will give you back some of these delights. You will
still see your real friends; and they will come to you with the intention
of giving and getting the best of themselves and of you, not in the
purposeless way in which one drifts into a visit here. You will be able,
too, to view things with a certain detachment--and that is a real
advantage; for I have sometimes thought that your literary work has
suffered from the variety of your interests, and from your being rather
too close to them to form a philosophical view. Your love of
characteristic points of natural scenery will help you. When you have
once grown familiar with the new surroundings, you will penetrate the
secret of their charm, as you have done here. You will be able, too, to
live a more undisturbed life, not fretted by all the cross-currents which
distract a man in his own land, when he has a large variety of ties. I
declare I did not know I was so good a rhetorician; I shall end by
convincing myself that there is no real happiness to be found except in

expatriation!
Seriously, my dear Herbert, I do understand the sadness of the change;
but one gets no good by dwelling on the darker side; there are and will
be times, I know, of depression. When one lies awake in the morning,
before the nerves are braced by contact with the wholesome day; when
one has done a tiring piece of work, and is alone, and in that frame of
mind when one needs occupation but yet is not brisk enough to turn to
the work one loves; in those dreary intervals between one's work, when
one is off with the old and not yet on with the new--well I know all the
corners of the road, the shadowy cavernous places where the demons
lie in wait for one, as they do for the wayfarer (do you remember?), in
Bewick, who, desiring to rest by the roadside, finds the dingle all alive
with ambushed fiends, horned and heavy-limbed, swollen with the
oppressive clumsiness of nightmare. But you are not inexperienced or
weak. You have enough philosophy to wait until the frozen mood
thaws, and the old thrill comes back. That is one of the real
compensations of middle age. When one is young, one imagines that
any depression will be continuous; and one sees the dreary,
uncomforted road winding ahead over bare hills, till it falls to the dark
valley. But later on one can believe that "the roadside dells of rest" are
there, even if one cannot see them; and, after all, you have a home
which goes with you; and it would seem to be fortunate, or to speak
more truly, tenderly prepared, that you have only daughters--a son, who
would have to go back to England to be educated, would be a source of
anxiety. Yet I find myself even wishing that you had a son, that I might
have the care of him over here. You don't know the heart-hunger I
sometimes have for young things of my own to watch over; to try to
guard their happiness. You would say that I had plenty of opportunities
in my profession; it is true in a sense, and I think I am perhaps a better
schoolmaster for being unmarried. But these boys are not one's own;
they drift away; they come back dutifully and affectionately to talk to
their old tutor; and we are both of us painfully conscious that we have
lost hold of the thread, and that the nearness of the tie that once existed
exists no more.
Well, I did not mean in this letter to begin bemoaning my own sorrows,

but rather to try and help you to bear your own. Tell me as soon as you
can what your plans are, and I will come down and see you for the last
time under the old conditions; perhaps the new will be happier. God
bless you, my old friend! Perhaps the light which has hitherto shone
(though fitfully)