Letter 055 Paris, February 19 1876
Dear Theo,
Thanks for your last letter and also for the catalogue sent in the last box. Have I thanked you already for Andersen’s tales? If not I do so now.
From home I have heard that this spring you will have to travel on business, you will not be sorry for that, I suppose; it is a good experience and you will see many beautiful things in your travels.
In the next box you will find Longfellow. Yesterday evening Gladwell was with me, he comes every Friday and we read poetry together. I have not read “Hyperion�yet, but I have heard that it is very beautiful.
I have just read a very beautiful book by Eliot, three tales, called “Scenes from Clerical Life� the last story in particular, “Janet’s Repentance,�struck me very much. It is the life of a clergyman who lives chiefly among the inhabitants of the dirty streets of a town, his study looks out on the gardens with stumps of cabbage, etc., and on the red roofs and smoking chimneys of poor tenements. For his dinner he usually had nothing but underdone mutton and watery potatoes. He died at the age of thirty-four and during his long illness he was nursed by a woman who was a drunkard, but by his teaching, and leaning as it were on him,
she had conquered her weakness and found rest for her soul. At his burial they read the chapter which says,
“I am the resurrection and the life, he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.�And now it is again Saturday evening, for the days pass so quickly and the time for my departure will soon be here. No answer as yet from Scarborough. Kind greetings and a handshake, always Your loving brother, Vincent