I answer your letter bang off. But so many thoughts go chasing through my head (do you see them? the last thought, rather slow, on a tricycle!) and there are so many things I'd like to talk over that it's not as easy as it sounds. … You know—it's queer—I feel so confident about you always. I feel that, the way you are building your boat, no harm can come to it. It will sail. You're building for the high seas, and Once you do take her out nothing will stop her.

About the old masters. What I feel about them (all of them—writers too, of course) is the more one lives with them the better it is for one's work. It's almost a case of living into one's ideal world—the world that one desires to express. Do you know what I mean? For this reason I find that if I stick to men like Chaucer and Shakespeare and Marlowe and even Tolstoi I keep much nearer what I want to do than if I confuse things with reading a lot of lesser men. I'd like to make the old masters my daily page 119 bread—in the sense in which it's used in the Lord's Prayer, really—to make them a kind of essential nourishment. All the rest is—well—it comes after.

I think I understand exactly what you mean by “visionary consciousness.” It fits the writer equally well. It's mysterious and it's difficult to get into words. There is this world, and there is the world that the artist creates in this world, which is nevertheless his world, and subject to his laws—his “vision.” Does that sound highflown? I don't mean it to be. It's difficult to get over, in a letter, a smile or a look or a something which makes it possible to say these things when one's with a person without that person feeling you are a bit of a priglet…

J. told me you were working at technique. So am I. It's extraordinarily difficult—don't you find? My particular difficulty is a kind of fertility—which I suspect very much. It's not solid enough. But I go at it every day. It's simply endlessly fascinating.

We are leaving here at the end of this week and creeping by funicular up to Montana. There I hope we shall stay for the next two years. We have our eye on a chalêt called Les Sapins which is in the midst of the forests—pine forests—there's not even a fence or a bar between it and the trees. So you picture the wolves breathing under the front door, the bears looking through our keyhole and bright tigers dashing at the lighted window panes. Montana is on a small plateau ringed round by mountains. I'll tell you more about it when we get there. J. has been up twice. He says it's the best place he's ever seen.

This place, Sierre, is in a valley. It's only 1500 feet high—very sheltered. Fig trees grow big, vines are everywhere; large flowery trees shake in the light. Marvellous light—Richard—and small lakes, bright, clear blue, where you can swim. Switzerland makes us laugh. It's a comic country: the people are extraordinary, like comic pictures and they are dead serious about it all. But there is something fine in it, too. They are ‘simple,’ page 120 unspoilt, honest and real democrats. The 3rd class passenger is just as good as the Ist class passenger in Switzerland and the shabbier you are the less you are looked at. No one expects you to be rich or to spend money. This makes life pleasant—very. They are not at all beautiful people; the men are very thick, stiff, ugly in the German way, and the women are nearly all dead plain. But seen from afar, in the fields, against mountains, they are all well in the picture. The Spring is a good time here. I arrived just as the field flowers were out; now the hay is gathered and the grapes are formed on the vines. I can't say, Richard, how I love the country. To watch the season through, to lose myself in love of the earth—that is life to me. I don't feel I could ever live in a city again. First the bare tree then the buds and the flowers, then the leaves, then the small fruit forming and swelling. If I only watch one tree a year one is richer for life.