To C. T. Newton

Herne Hill, 20th January, 1854.

Dear Newton,—I only heard yesterday of your distress in the loss of your father, or I should have written long ago to assure you how sorry I am for you, and how sincerely I can sympathise with the feeling which such a loss must excite when you are so far away, and so completely alone. Mrs. Prinsep told me that you were very sorrowful and that you had no one near you towards whom you could feel any regard. I am afraid I must have added to this pain in some degree by my own long silence, which, after sending me so kind a letter and so cordial an invitation, you must have thought worse than heartless. I put it off’ from day to day, always thinking I had not time to write a letter worth sending to Mitylene, and always feeling that I had so much to say it was no use to try to put it into a letter. Much to say, yet perhaps little that would interest you now—the whole current of your mind having been necessarily turned in other directions—and mine, since we parted in Milan,1 having become still more rigidly fixed in its old ones; to a degree which would make you very angry if you were much with me;—I having come to look upon the Elgin marbles as a public nuisance, and to find no pleasure but in Turner, Tintoret, and Gothic of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—whether I find said Gothic in stone work or in missal painting.