The Mud House,
Friday's Hill,
Haslemere.

August 3rd. 1936.

Dear Mr. Clapp,

Many thanks for your letter of May 25th., I was too ill to answer it and when I lifted up my head from the pillow I took various doses of Opium and had myself transported to this quiet spot in the Surrey hills, my daughter's country cottage. Here I am getting much better and hope to be able to join B.B. when he comes to London in September. He is now exploring the wilds of Serbia looking up the Byzantine churches and Monasteries and frecoes which were executed long after Byzantinism and the rest of Europe was dead. He is having a most interesting trip, and part of the joy of it is to be away from Italy. The storm clouds that hang over the Balkans are less personal and easier to bear than the recent Italian developments.

We hear on every hand that you have been wonderfully successful in your re-arrangement of the Frick Collection. We both look forward to seeing it in the autumn of next year when we are planning a last trip to the United States. Who knows, we may settle there if things become too horrible here. But

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we are tied by our "plant" at Settignano; we could hand it over
to Harvard, but I don't think they would accept it if conditions
are so bad that we ourselves can't live there.

B.B. would be very grateful to you if you would send him
a photograph of your Piero della Fransceco and any details of
it that may have been taken. Send to I Tatti,
have

I shall another book of travels to send you presently -
this time not my own travels for I have been ill for so long,
but the journey to Libya taken by B.B. and Nicky and the Costers:
I call it a "Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast".

Please give my love to your wife, you both have a warm
place in our memory.

I TATTI
SETTIGNANO
FLORENCE

May 6th, 1928.

My dear "Tim",

EB asks me to thank you for your letter from the Steamer,
and to answer it for him in so far as relates to our summer plans.

He will be here till the end of July, and then at

Poggio allo Spino,

Consuma,

until the middle of September. This place is only an hour's motor
trip from Florence, and we do hope we shall see you both either
here or there. I may have to go off to a Kur and a Nachkur in June
and July, much as I hate it! - but Nicky will be here all the time
that I am away, going on her holiday only when I come back early
in August.

After mid-September we are faced, as we have been faced for
the last twenty five years, with the question whether to go or
not to go to Constantinople. I fancy it will resolve itself into
showing Nicky Spain, where she has never been.

We are all much taken with the plan for your University
building, except that I think even the most successful architectur-
al scheme cannot make up for the lack of a Campus where the boys
meet and chat on their way to and from their classes. Rushing up
and down in a lift is a very poor substitute for fresh air and
loitering legs.

We all three send love to you both and hope that your holiday
will rest you and make you fit for further "culture-humming".

I TATTI
SETTIGNANO
FLORENCE

November 5th 1936

My dear Tim,

B.B. has not yet come back from his travels, but I have myself been reading your "New Poems", and I must write and tell you that I am enchanted with them. There is considerable beauty of texture (according to my standards); but even more than that, there is a very remarkable personality revealed in them - sensitive, profound and penetrating. My own reactions to life are very different from yours, for life seems to come to me more and more as waves of exstasy, and what Santayana calls "animal faith" in the goodness and beauty of the universe. But I confess that I at times feel that I am a superficious, selfish Hedonist to be able to be happy in the sort of world my mind tells me this world is!

If you can have more respect for your attitude than for my own, at any rate, I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated your poems.

Please give my love to your wife and receive my affectionate regards and thanks for yourself.