16th Sept. 1864
My dear Mrs Pollock
Had I trusted the impulse of my soul on reading your last letter1 I should at once have replied to you promising to go to the Island.2 But as I get older I learn more and more the necessity of waiting to see whether the impulse is realizable. Now I do not see my way clearly as yet. You speak of two little days. It cannot be done in two days. Saturday is used up in going down: Sunday I spend there, and Monday is occupied in coming up. Then I quit the Island with you and your husband and all the occurrences that take place during my visit in my mind. to expel these costs more than a day, so that really your two little days is only a fraction of the time needed. I am now working incessantly at my book.3 It would be wrong in me to quit it till it is complete. If afterwards I can take a run down to you I will do so. Probably I shall work myself into a condition which will compel me to run away and if so compelled I will run off to you.
I got your letter in Bormio4—It was sent after me from Pontresina,5 and it cheered me so much, not that I needed cheering for I was very jolly at the time, but it was so pleasant to me that I then and there sat down and replied to it. My letter contained a note to Sir John Herschel,6 and I posted the letter myself. But the post office people in the Italian valleys of the Alps are ineffably stupid and careless. They were very near causing my friend Ball7 to quarrel with me through the retention of a letter which he ought to have received a fortnight before it reached him.
Your letter received at Bormio caused me to long to see Turner’s poems:8 since I came back I have learned from Reviews that he is “theological.”9 I am sorry for this—His theology is the more “rotten pole” as your husband10 once helped me to express it round which the fresh tendrils of his heart cling—I can hardly excuse the intellectual mistake of a man who confounds such a rotten pole with the permanent and eternal.
Good bye | Yours ever | John Tyndall
I have made myself an exile from Bath,11 notwithstanding all its seductions.
RI MS JT/1/T/1142
RI MS JT/1/TYP/6/2021
your last letter: letter 2135.
the Island: the Isle of Wight.
my book: Tyndall had recently begun work on the second edition of Heat as a Mode of Motion (in letter 2134, he had written to Pollock that the publishers were ‘demanding a second edition’).
your letter in Bormio: letter 2134. Bormio is a town and commune located in the Lombardy region of the Alps in northern Italy.
Pontresina: see letter 2121, n. 2.
a note to Sir John Herschel: Tyndall noted in his next letter to Herschel (2140) that he was now aware that he would not have received this earlier letter. See also letters 2134 and 2135.
Ball: John Ball.
Turner’s poems: see letter 2126, n. 2.
Reviews that he is “theological.”: possibly ‘Reviews: Sonnets by the Rev. Charles Turner’, Saturday Review, 6 August 1864, pp. 184–5.
your husband: William Frederick Pollock.
Bath: see letter 2138, n. 1.
Please cite as “Tyndall2139,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on