To Juliet Pollock   Good Friday¹

Good Friday

My dear M^rs. Pollock

It is very kind both of you and M^r Pollock to write to me, & read both your letters² with very great pleasure. I have just received a bundle of letters³ and they are almost all pleasant ones. De la Rive writes to me⁴ from Geneva in a most affectionate style—enclosing me a diploma of membre honoraire of the Genevese Socête de physique.⁵ Dove writes to me⁶ very pleasantly from Berlin, other letters came from other places more or less distant, and on the whole they diffuse around me quite an intellectual fragrance, which it is very pleasant to enjoy.

I have just completed my lake excursion,⁷ and a most pleasant & successful one it has been. I had many grand days, though perhaps no day so grand as that one upon Helvellyn.⁸ On Sunday last I was strongly tempted to trespass upon the grounds of your friends at Greta Bank⁹—it would have shortened our way up Skiddaw.¹⁰ However we reached the summit without doing any thing illegal. It was a fine day, the proportion of sunshine to cloud greater than on the day preceding, but there was no such concentrations of atmospheric energy. There was a sleepy sunny effect diffused over the landscape, and sometimes dark cloud shadows moved over it, but on the whole it was a dilution of the grandeur of Saturday. On the summit there is a post and from the post long streamers of snow were drawn out like the filaments of a gray beard to windward. Many of these were of the most beautiful structure: exactly like a complicated moss bleached to whiteness and frozen to ice.

From Keswick¹¹ we went through Borrodale¹²—exploring the action of its ancient Glaciers, and afterward¹³

RI MS JT/1/T/1210

RI MS JT/1/TYP/6/1962