To Logan Pearsall Smith
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. May 29, 1918
Please tell Mrs Berenson that I had been looking forward with pleasure to seeing her, but I can’t very well go to London this week, so that I hope you will let me know when she is again in town, as usually I am quite free, and always glad to come to see and hear what is going on in your hospitable circle, which to me represents the centre of the intellectual world. Oxford, very decidedly, does not. It is a sort of celestial epicycle—an eccentric and back-handed convolution suspected by some to have no real existence, except in the mind of the ancients. Physically, however, Oxford is really heavenly in these days: I have had today a most delightful day, walking in the morning: through Nuneham Park (where an ostrich made faces at me, and threatened hostilities) to lunch (very well) at the Harcourt Arms, and walk back to Littlemore through fields covered with flowers and made companiable by cuckoos, peewits, and larks. I wonder if the iteration of the cuckoo’s note ever really made husbands uncomfortable. I think it well might, because repetition can persuade us of anything.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Library of Congress, Washington DC.