Feel very weary after the year’s cramming. It leaves one hopelessly adrift. I had thought to end my troubles with the exams, but the latter being finished, new and vaguer ones have arisen. Slummed all the week, going to Horgans´ and a tennis party at Sullivans´, and tidying and arranging all my old books. On Friday we decamped. The lorry, being only three hours late, we were involved in a very slight mess, but everything finally came right. The house is charming. There are wonderful cliffs, headlands, caves all around, complete solitude on the hills. Have at last commenced work, doing Maths. (for Matric.), exercises in Harmony, keeping up Latin with reading Horace’s Epodes and ‘Noctes Latinae’, a collection of short stories, studying a sound book of German compositions and reading an excellent historical-atmospherical novel ‘Der junge Beethoven’ ((Ludwig Schiedermair, Der junge Beethoven, Leipzig 1925)) [The Young Beethoven] and finally reading and nearly finishing the good, the old, the true, the never-fading and ever-appealing ‘Pickwick Papers’. Have two (with the intention of three) swims a day, and am training like a prize-boxer by doing long runs and going [for] long walks. On the whole it is an ideal place, and we are having an ideal holiday, for ‘Es bildet ein Talent sich in dieser Stille, sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt.’ ((Goethe, Torquato Tasso. Aloys writes this in the old Sütterlin German handwriting.)) [Talent is formed in quiet places, character in the current of the world.]
