TALBOT6449

Dresden Sunday
August 3^d 1851

My dear Constance

I received the letter you wrote to Berlin which came in 3 days from Grasmere, and I was greatly pleased on my arrival here yesterday to find your letter of the 29^th just arrived, giving an account of Charles’s safe return. Everything seems to have been successful, even to the fineness of the day of the 28^th on which you went to meet him. I hope also that the arrangement with M^r Green will be found to answer and help to make the holidays pleasant.

I am just going off to the “Saxon Switzerland for a day, a romantic district about 20 miles from this city, so I must defer to another time my account of the eclipse, which I observed successfully on the whole though interrupted with clouds, at Marienburg near Dantzic. I have been strolling through the picture gallery the great Lion of Dresden, it was full of people of the middle classes enjoying themselves. The pictures are remarkably well lighted and easy to see, owing to the sun shining on an opposite range of lofty white houses which reflected a flood of diffused light through the gallery. It takes some time to study these works of the old masters before one admires them as much as one ought. Caroline very kindly wrote to me on the 28^th from Belgrave Square and I received her letter at Berlin on the 30^th, so that I must have heard the great news almost as soon as you, for though she ends her letter by saying she is just going to write to you I imagine her letter was “too late” as you do not allude to the event in yours of the 29^th – She has since written to me twice the accounts are not comfortable but certainly improving.

The weather has been very hot indeed almost overpowering – yesterday we had a change, and a wet afternoon but today extraordinary splendid weather lighting up everything with quite an Italian sun –

Your aff^te
Henry