From Juliet Pollock   August 31.st¹

S^t. Julians. Sevenoaks. August 31.^st

My dear M^r. Tyndall

Here comes one of my maternal lectures for you: I am dismayed at your solitary ascent of Monte Rosa,² and I call upon you to remember that however muscularly strong you may be, you must, in common with the rest of humanity, be subject to casualties, and that such a casualty as a sprained ankle a swelled knee, a sudden faintness, or a sudden fog, would place you (alone on a steep glacier) in considerable jeopardy; and to my thinking it is really not right to risk a valuable life in such a way. Now I have done. I have administered the draught of physic, and I must see if I can find some plums to take out the taste but here, I am not in contact with any of your particular friends, though nature the common friend of us all, is showing her face to me, full of sweetness and beauty. The distant landscape is much of the same character that you have at Tunbridge Wells³ & especially like that you can perhaps recall, that opens out upon you from the churchyard of Rusthall,⁴ but here, we have a greener and fuller foliage in the foreground—more variety of wood, and a smoother surface of grass. The present richness of the hop gardens is an additional charm in our walks. The poles bend beneath their weight and bowing towards each other make sometimes Gothic and sometimes Norman arches and in one instance the hop plant climbing above its own pole has attached itself to the lower branches of an old oak, hanging upon them caressingly and gracefully the clusters of its fruit. If you have never been in a hop country there is something beautiful that you have not yet seen.—

My husband⁵ is in town at present but he will I trust join me on Thursday. I have Fred⁶ and Maurice⁷ with me—There is my Aunt,⁸ I grieve to say still an invalid, to endeavour to cheer, for her spirits are tried, and there is Edward Herries⁹ who has been to me always a very dear Brother. Charles¹⁰ and Isey¹¹ are both absent at present.—

I feel the truth of all you say about my darling Walter,¹² but I confess that having had him to spend two days with us before coming here I felt the 2.^d parting quite as grievously as the first, for he appeared not able yet to reconcile himself to our separation.—

He is anxious to write to you but I have advised his waiting till you return to England as his hand is so very large. The time that children are kept at large text seems to me a mistake in the system of education.

The quiet intervals that I have here, I give to the reading of Carlyle’s Cromwell¹³ a book full of deep interest and of great entertainment. Do you know it? You probably do.—

I have read a good deal also of Hogg’s life of Shelley,¹⁴ and whatever Keats may say of Adonais,¹⁵ it is evident to me from his own letters, I take no other testimony, that he was a man of an essentially bad mind, and that his total denial of all authority, beginning from the highest, his total abnegation of all restraints led to such a course of vice as ought to be the consequence of such a theory of life. When one man writes to another

I shall hope to hear from you again.—

Believe me always, my dear M^r. Tyndall | Yours most truly | Juliet Pollock | I am sorry for the tooth of time

If you write to me after the 16^th address | M^rs J. Pollock | Greta Bank | Keswick | Cumberland¹⁶

RI MS JT/1/P/193