Wednesday
My Dear Henry
I wish very much you would chuse the very best Camera Obscura that is to be had, & let me give it you. I am sure your discovery would be perfect dans son genre <1> if you had a better instrument to work with, & it is worth anything to your celebrity to possess such a one. You do not vouchsafe to let us know what you are about, nevertheless I will tell you what I have been doing. I have just completed painting all the Iron fences, the one towards the Lodge included, and the Entrance Gate for the good of the Place. I have taken off some of the Ivy which entirely concealed the beauty of the Tudor Arch of the Gateway, <2> & now it will be a lovely object for photography, before the Ivy covers it again, which it is sure to do very soon. It is an uncommonly beautiful Arch and any farmer can have Ivy, but few people possess Architecture, or anything that can be called such.
Today I began to thin Horatia Copse, a rabbit could not have got in, till an opening was made among the thickets. It was like les Forêts Vierges de L’amérique. <3> A great author says il ne faut jamais désesperer [sic] des nations <4> I say the same of woods. We liberated some splendid young Oaks, & indeed the only ones I see coming on anywhere are there & in Caroline copse you should begin to plant for Posterity. Constance <5> has always set her heart on having a Flower Garden where the water is, a Man has offered me 300 load of soil only for the fetching If I find that will not cost too much, have you any objection? She says you said the only one was the expence, now if I do it, that will be null, & it will amuse me to do it, & make the place besides less damp for the Children. Answer by return of post, because if you have no objection we had better not lose time while the weather is tolerable, & besides if I don’t take the 300 load of soil the man will let somebody else have it, as he wants to get rid of it soon that he may make a garden in its place
Yrs
E F
Notes:
1. In his own style.
2. For this image see ‘“Gothic Gateway” at the entrance to Lacock Abbey’, Schaaf 2344, reproduced in Larry J. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 70.
3. The Virgin Forests of America.
4. She probably means ‘one should never despair of nations’.
5. Constance Talbot, née Mundy (1811–1880), WHFT’s wife.