To Dr. John Brown

Pisa, June 27th, 1846.

My dear Sir,—I should have answered your very kind letter before, had I not unfortunately been for a week or two out of the way of receiving letters at all, so that the time between your writing and my receiving was longer than it should have been. I need not say that I am grateful to you for expressing your feelings to me, and that the support of such assurances of sympathy is in every way precious. You appear to feel at present perhaps a little too enthusiastically; as I suppose is generally the case with our first reception of that for which we are prepared by previous tendencies of feeling in the same direction.… I have to thank you for your invitation to Edinburgh; it is not impossible I may have the pleasure of seeing you there at no very far-off day, but it will be admiration and not curiosity that brings me there, for many of my very earliest memories are connected with the old city, though more of them with the country north of the Forth, I having been half bred at Perth, and having some impressions of the Grampians and the Tay in consequence, which even your friend Mr. Hill, in his pretty vignette to Scott's Fair Maid, has very sufficiently failed of realising. It is not his fault, I suppose, he could not paint all the stones that I used to build piers with in the clear water.