Chapter 2

not, as you felt? And I, the writer of the foolish one, am twice-foolish, and push poor 'Luria' out of sight, and refuse to finish my notes on him till the harm he has done shall have passed away. In my badness I bring false accusation, perhaps, against poor Luria.

So till Wednesday--or as you shall fix otherwise.

Your

BA.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

6-1/2 Tuesday Evening.

My dearest, your note reaches me only _now_, with an excuse from the postman. The answer you expect, you shall have the only way possible. I must make up a parcel so as to be able to knock and give it. I shall be with you to-morrow, God willing--being quite well.

Bless you ever--

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Thursday Morning. [Post-mark, February 19, 1846.]

My sweetest, best, dearest Ba I _do_ love you less, much less already, and adore you more, more by so much more as I see of you, think of you--I am yours just as much as those flowers; and you may pluck those flowers to pieces or put them in your breast; it is not because you so bless me now that you may not if you please one day--you will stop me here; but it is the truth and I live in it.

I am quite well; indeed, this morning, _noticeably_ well, they tell me, and well I mean to keep if I can.

When I got home last evening I found this note--and I have _accepted_, that I might say I could also keep an engagement, if so minded, at Harley Street--thereby insinuating that other reasons _may_ bring me into the neighbourhood than _the_ reason--but I shall either not go there, or only for an hour at most. I also found a note headed 'Strictly private and confidential'--so here it goes from my mouth to my heart--pleasantly proposing that I should start in a few days for St. Petersburg, as secretary to somebody going there on a 'mission of humanity'--_grazie tante_!

Did you hear of my meeting someone at the door whom I take to have been one of your brothers?

One thing vexed me in your letter--I will tell you, the praise of _my_ letters. Now, one merit they have--in language mystical--that of having _no_ merit. If I caught myself trying to write finely, graphically &c. &c., nay, if I found myself conscious of having in my own opinion, so written, all would be over! yes, over! I should be respecting you inordinately, paying a proper tribute to your genius, summoning the necessary collectedness,--plenty of all that! But the feeling with which I write to you, not knowing that it is writing,--with _you_, face and mouth and hair and eyes opposite me, touching me, knowing that all _is_ as I say, and helping out the imperfect phrases from your own intuition--_that_ would be gone--and _what_ in its place? 'Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we write to Ambleside.' No, no, love, nor can it ever be so, nor should it ever be so if--even if, preserving all that intimate relation, with the carelessness, _still_, somehow, was obtained with no effort in the world, graphic writing and philosophic and what you please--for I _will_ be--_would_ be, better than my works and words with an infinite stock beyond what I put into convenient circulation whether in fine speeches fit to remember, or fine passages to quote. For the rest, I had meant to tell you before now, that you often put me 'in a maze' when you particularize letters of mine--'such an one was kind' &c. I know, sometimes I seem to give the matter up in despair, I take out paper and fall thinking on you, and bless you with my whole heart and then begin: 'What a fine day this is?' I distinctly remember having done that repeatedly--but the converse is not true by any means, that (when the expression may happen to fall more consentaneously to the mind's motion) that less is felt, oh no! But the particular thought at the time has not been of the _insufficiency_ of expression, as in the other instance.

Now I will leave off--to begin elsewhere--for I am always with you, beloved, best beloved! Now you will write? And walk much, and sleep more? Bless you, dearest--ever--

Your own,

_E.B.B. to R.B._

[Post-marks, Mis-sent to Mitcham. February 19 and 20, 1846.]

Best and kindest of all that ever were to be loved in dreams, and wondered at and loved out of them, you are indeed! I cannot make you feel how I felt that night when I knew that to save me an anxious thought you had come so far so late--it was almost too much to feel, and _is_ too much to speak. So let it pass. You will never act so again, ever dearest--you shall not. If the post sins, why leave the sin to the post; and I will remember for the future, will be ready to remember, how postmen are fallible and how you live at the end of a lane--and not be uneasy about a silence if there should be one unaccounted for. For the Tuesday coming, I shall remember that too--who could forget it?... I put it in the niche of the wall, one golden lamp more of your giving, to throw light purely down to the end of my life--I do thank you. And the truth is, I _should_ have been in a panic, had there been no letter that evening--I was frightened the day before, then reasoned the fears back and waited: and if there had been no letter after all--. But you are supernaturally good and kind. How can I ever 'return' as people say (as they might say in their ledgers) ... any of it all? How indeed can I who have not even a heart left of my own, to love you with?

I quite trust to your promise in respect to the medical advice, if walking and rest from work do not prevent at once the recurrence of those sensations--it was a promise, remember. And you will tell me the very truth of how you are--and you will try the music, and not be nervous, dearest. Would not _riding_ be good for you--consider. And why should you be 'alone' when your sister is in the house? How I keep thinking of you all day--you cannot really be alone with so many thoughts ... such swarms of thoughts, if you could but see them, drones and bees together!

George came in from Westminster Hall after we parted yesterday and said that he had talked with the junior counsel of the wretched plaintiffs in the Ferrers case, and that the belief was in the mother being implicated, although not from the beginning. It was believed too that the miserable girl had herself taken step after step into the mire, involved herself gradually, the first guilt being an extravagance in personal expenses, which she lied and lied to account for in the face of her family. 'Such a respectable family,' said George, 'the grandfather in court looking venerable, and everyone indignant upon being so disgraced by her!' But for the respectability in the best sense, I do not quite see. That all those people should acquiesce in the indecency (according to every standard of English manners in any class of society) of thrusting the personal expenses of a member of their family on Lord Ferrers, she still bearing their name--and in those peculiar circumstances of her supposed position too--where is the respectability? And they are furious with her, which is not to be wondered at after all. Her counsel had an interview with her previous to the trial, to satisfy themselves of her good faith, and she was quite resolute and earnest, persisting in every statement. On the coming out of the anonymous letters, Fitzroy Kelly said to the juniors that if anyone could suggest a means of explanation, he would be eager to carry forward the case, ... but for him he saw no way of escaping from the fact of the guilt of their client. Not a voice could speak for her. So George was told. There is no ground for a prosecution for a conspiracy, he says, but she is open to the charge for _forgery_, of course, and to the dreadful consequences, though it is not considered at all likely that Lord Ferrers could wish to disturb her beyond the ruin she has brought on her own life.

Think of Miss Mitford's growing quite cold about Mr. Chorley who has spent two days with her lately, and of her saying in a letter to me this morning that he is very much changed and grown to be 'a presumptuous coxcomb.' He has displeased her in some way--that is clear. What changes there are in the world.

Should I ever change to _you_, do you think, ... even if you came to 'love me less'--not that I meant to reproach you with that possibility. May God bless you, dear dearest. It is another miracle (beside the many) that I get nearer to the mountains yet still they seem more blue. Is not _that_ strange?

Ever and wholly

Your BA.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Thursday Evening. [Post-mark, February 20, 1846.]

And I offended you by praising your letters--or rather _mine_, if you please--as if I had not the right! Still, you shall not, shall not fancy that I meant to praise them in the way you seem to think--by calling them 'graphic,' 'philosophic,'--why, did I ever use such words? I agree with you that if I could play critic upon your letters, it would be an end!--but no, no ... I did not, for a moment. In what I said I went back to my first impressions--and they were _vital_ letters, I said--which was the résumé of my thoughts upon the early ones you sent me, because I felt your letters to be _you_ from the very first, and I began, from the beginning, to read every one several times over. Nobody, I felt, nobody of all these writers, did write as you did. Well!--and had I not a right to say _that_ now at last, and was it not natural to say just _that_, when I was talking of other people's letters and how it had grown almost impossible for me to read them; and do I deserve to be scolded? No indeed.

And if I had the misfortune to think now, when you say it is a fine day, that _that_ is said in more music than it could be said in by another--where is the sin against _you_, I should like to ask. It is yourself who is the critic, I think, after all. But over all the brine, I hold my letters--just as Camoens did his poem. They are _best to me_--and they are _best_. I knew what _they_ were, before I knew what _you_ were--all of you. And I like to think that I never fancied anyone on a level with you, even in a letter.

What makes you take them to be so bad, I suppose, is just feeling in them how near we are. _You say that!_--not I.

Bad or good, you _are_ better--yes, 'better than the works and words'!--though it was very shameful of you to insinuate that I talked of fine speeches and passages and graphical and philosophical sentences, as if I had proposed a publication of 'Elegant Extracts' from your letters. See what blasphemy one falls into through a beginning of light speech! It is wiser to talk of St. Petersburg; for all Voltaire's ... '_ne disons pas de mal de Nicolas_.'

Wiser--because you will not go. If you were going ... well!--but there is no danger--it would not do you good to go, I am so happy this time as to be able to think--and your 'mission of humanity' lies nearer--'strictly private and confidential'? but not in Harley Street--so if you go _there_, dearest, keep to the 'one hour' and do not suffer yourself to be tired and stunned in those hot rooms and made unwell again--it is plain that you cannot bear that sort of excitement. For Mr. Kenyon's note, ... it was a great temptation to make a day of Friday--but I resist both for Monday's sake and for yours, because it seems to me safer not to hurry you from one house to another till you are tired completely. I shall think of you so much the nearer for Mr. Kenyon's note--which is something gained. In the meanwhile you are better, which is everything, or seems so. Ever dearest, do you remember what it is to me that you should be better, and keep from being worse again--I mean, of course, _try_ to keep from being worse--be wise ... and do not stay long in those hot Harley Street rooms. Ah--now you will think that I am afraid of the unicorns!--

Through your being ill the other day I forgot, and afterwards went on forgetting, to speak of and to return the ballad--which is delightful; I have an unspeakable delight in those suggestive ballads, which seem to make you touch with the end of your finger the full warm life of other times ... so near they bring you, yet so suddenly all passes in them. Certainly there is a likeness to your Duchess--it is a curious crossing. And does it not strike you that a verse or two must be wanting in the ballad--there is a gap, I fancy.

Tell Mr. Kenyon (if he enquires) that you come here on Monday instead of Saturday--and if you can help it, do not mention Wednesday--it will be as well, not. You met Alfred at the door--he came up to me afterwards and observed that 'at last he had seen you!' 'Virgilium tantum vidi!'

As to the thing which you try to say in the first page of this letter, and which you 'stop' yourself in saying ... _I_ need not stop you in it....

And now there is no time, if I am to sleep to-night. May God bless you, dearest, dearest.

I must be your own while He blesses _me_.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Friday Afternoon. [Post-mark, February 20, 1846.]

Here is my Ba's dearest _first_ letter come four hours after the second, with '_Mis-sent to Mitcham_' written on its face as a reason,--one more proof of the negligence of somebody! But I _do_ have it at last--what should I say? what do you expect me to say? And the first note seemed quite as much too kind as usual!

Let me write to-morrow, sweet? I am quite well and sure to mind all you bid me. I shall do no more than look in at that place (they are the cousins of a really good friend of mine, Dr. White--I go for _him_) if even that--for to-morrow night I must go out again, I fear--to pay the ordinary compliment for an invitation to the R.S.'s _soirée_ at Lord Northampton's. And then comes Monday--and to-night any unicorn I may see I will not find myself at liberty to catch. (N.B.--should you meditate really an addition to the 'Elegant Extracts'--mind this last joke is none of mine but my father's; when walking with me when a child, I remember, he bade a little urchin we found fishing with a stick and a string for sticklebacks in a ditch--'to mind that he brought any sturgeon he might catch to the king'--he having a claim on such a prize, by courtesy if not right).

As for Chorley, he is neither the one nor the other of those ugly things. One remembers Regan's 'Oh Heaven--so you will rail at _me_, when you are in the mood.' But what a want of self-respect such judgments argue, or rather, want of knowledge what true self-respect is: 'So I believed yesterday, and _so_ now--and yet am neither hasty, nor inapprehensive, nor malevolent'--what then?

--But I will say more of my mind--(not of that)--to-morrow, for time presses a little--so bless you my ever ever dearest--I love you wholly.

R.B.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Friday Morning. [Post-mark, February 21, 1846.]

As my sisters did not dine at home yesterday and I see nobody else in the evening, I never heard till just now and _from Papa himself_, that 'George was invited to meet Mr. Browning and Mr. Procter.' How surprised you will be. It must have been a sudden thought of Mr. Kenyon's.

And I have been thinking, thinking since last night that I wrote you then a letter all but ... insolent ... which, do you know, I feel half ashamed to look back upon this morning--particularly what I wrote about 'missions of humanity'--now was it not insolent of me to write so? If I could take my letter again I would dip it into Lethe between the lilies, instead of the post office:--but I can't--so if you wondered, you must forget as far as possible, and understand how it was, and that I was in brimming spirits when I wrote, from two causes ... first, because I had your letter which was a pure goodness of yours, and secondly because you were 'noticeably' better you said, or 'noticeably well' rather, to mind my quotations. So I wrote what I wrote, and gave it to Arabel when she came in at midnight, to give it to Henrietta who goes out before eight in the morning and often takes charge of my letters, and it was too late, at the earliest this morning, to feel a little ashamed. Miss Thomson told me that she had determined to change the type of the few pages of her letterpress which had been touched, and that therefore Mr. Burges's revisions of my translations should be revised back again. She appears to be a very acute person, full of quick perceptions--naturally quick, and carefully trained--a little over anxious perhaps about mental lights, and opening her eyes still more than she sees, which is a common fault of clever people, if one must call it a fault. I like her, and she is kind and cordial. Will she ask you to help her book with a translation or two, I wonder. Perhaps--if the courage should come. Dearest, how I shall think of you this evening, and how near you will seem, not to be here. I had a letter from Mr. Mathews the other day, and smiled to read in it just what I had expected, that he immediately sent Landor's verses on you to a _few editors_, friends of his, in order to their communication to the public. He received my apology for myself with the utmost graciousness. A kind good man he is.

After all, do you know, I am a little vexed that I should have even _seemed_ to do wrong in my speech about the letters. It must have been wrong, if it seemed so to you, I fancy now. Only I really did no more mean to try your letters ... mine ... such as they are to me now, by the common critical measure, than the shepherds praised the pure tenor of the angels who sang 'Peace upon earth' to them. It was enough that they knew it for angels' singing. So do _you_ forgive me, beloved, and put away from you the thought that I have let in between us any miserable stuff 'de métier,' which I hate as you hate. And I will not say any more about it, not to run into more imprudences of mischief.

On the other hand I warn you against saying again what you began to say yesterday and stopped. Do not try it again. What may be quite good sense from me, is from _you_ very much the reverse, and pray observe that difference. Or did you think that I was making my own road clear in the the thing I said about--'jilts'? No, you did not. Yet I am ready to repeat of myself as of others, that if I ceased to love you, I certainly would act out the whole consequence--but _that_ is an impossible 'if' to my nature, supposing the conditions of it otherwise to be probable. I never loved anyone much and ceased to love that person. Ask every friend of mine, if I am given to change even in friendship! _And to you...!_ Ah, but you never think of such a thing seriously--and you are conscious that you did not say it very sagely. You and I are in different positions. Now let me tell you an apologue in exchange for your Wednesday's stories which I liked so, and mine perhaps may make you 'a little wiser'--who knows?

It befell that there stood in hall a bold baron, and out he spake to one of his serfs ... 'Come thou; and take this baton of my baronie, and give me instead thereof that sprig of hawthorn thou holdest in thine hand.' Now the hawthorn-bough was no larger a thing than might be carried by a wood-pigeon to the nest, when she flieth low, and the baronial baton was covered with fine gold, and the serf, turning it in his hands, marvelled greatly.

And he answered and said, 'Let not my lord be in haste, nor jest with his servant. Is it verily his will that I should keep his golden baton? Let him speak again--lest it repent him of his gift.'

And the baron spake again that it was his will. 'And I'--he said once again--'shall it be lawful for me to keep this sprig of hawthorn, and will it not repent thee of thy gift?'

Then all the servants who stood in hall, laughed, and the serf's hands trembled till they dropped the baton into the rushes, knowing that his lord did but jest....

Which mine did not. Only, _de te fabula narratur_ up to a point.

And I have your letter. 'What did I expect?' Why I expected just _that_, a letter in turn. Also I am graciously pleased (yes, and very much pleased!) to '_let_ you write to-morrow.' How you spoil me with goodness, which makes one 'insolent' as I was saying, now and then.

The worst is, that I write 'too kind' letters--I!--and what does that criticism mean, pray? It reminds me, at least, of ... now I will tell you what it reminds me of.

A few days ago Henrietta said to me that she was quite uncomfortable. She had written to somebody a not kind enough letter, she thought, and it might be taken ill. 'Are _you_ ever uncomfortable, Ba, after you have sent letters to the post?' she asked me.

'Yes,' I said, 'sometimes, but from a reason just the very reverse of your reason, _my_ letters, when they get into the post, seem too kind,--rather.' And my sisters laughed ... laughed.

But if _you_ think so beside, I must seriously set to work, you see, to correct that flagrant fault, and shall do better in time _dis faventibus_, though it will be difficult.

Mr. Kenyon's dinner is a riddle which I cannot read. _You_ are invited to meet Miss Thomson and Mr. Bayley and '_no one else_.' George is invited to meet Mr. Browning and Mr. Procter and '_no one else_'--just those words. The '_absolu_' (do you remember Balzac's beautiful story?) is just _you_ and 'no one else,' the other elements being mere uncertainties, shifting while one looks for them.

Am I not writing nonsense to-night? I am not 'too _wise_' in any case, which is some comfort. It puts one in spirits to hear of your being 'well,' ever and ever dearest. Keep so for _me_. May God bless you hour by hour. In every one of mine I am your own

BA.

For Miss Mitford ...

But people are not angels quite ...

and she sees the whole world in stripes of black and white, it is her way. I feel very affectionately towards her, love her sincerely. She is affectionate to _me_ beyond measure. Still, always I feel that if I were to vex her, the lower deep below the lowest deep would not be low enough for _me_. I always feel _that_. She would advertise me directly for a wretch proper.

Then, for all I said about never changing, I have ice enough over me just now to hold the sparrows!--in respect to a great crowd of people, and she is among them--for reasons--for reasons.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Saturday Morning. [Post-mark, February 23, 1846.]

So all was altered, my love--and, instead of Miss T. and the other friend, I had your brother and Procter--to my great pleasure. After, I went to that place, and soon got away, and am very well this morning in the sunshine; which I feel with you, do I not? Yesterday after dinner we spoke of Mrs. Jameson, and, as my wont is--(Here your letter reaches me--let me finish this sentence now I have finished kissing you, dearest beyond all dearness--My own heart's Ba!)--oh, as I am used, I left the talking to go on by itself, with the thought busied elsewhere, till at last my own voice startled me for I heard my tongue utter 'Miss Barrett ... that is, Mrs. Jameson says' ... or 'does ... or does not.' I forget which! And if anybody noticed the _gaucherie_ it must have been just your brother!

Now to these letters! I do solemnly, unaffectedly wonder how you can put so much pure felicity into an envelope so as that I shall get it as from the fount head. This to-day, those yesterday--there is, I see, and know, thus much goodness in line after line, goodness to be scientifically appreciated, _proved there_--but over and above, is it in the writing, the dots and traces, the seal, the paper--here does the subtle charm lie beyond all rational accounting for? The other day I stumbled on a quotation from J. Baptista Porta--wherein he avers that any musical instrument made out of wood possessed of medicinal properties retains, being put to use, such virtues undiminished,--and that, for instance, a sick man to whom you should pipe on a pipe of elder-tree would so receive all the advantage derivable from a decoction of its berries. From whence, by a parity of reasoning, I may discover, I think, that the very ink and paper were--ah, what were they? Curious thinking won't do for me and the wise head which is mine, so I will lie and rest in my ignorance of content and understand that without any magic at all you simply wish to make one person--which of your free goodness proves to be your R.B.--to make me supremely happy, and that you have your wish--you _do_ bless me! More and more, for the old treasure is piled undiminished and still the new comes glittering in. Dear, dear heart of my heart, life of my life, _will this last_, let _me_ begin to ask? Can it be meant I shall live this to the end? Then, dearest, care also for the life beyond, and put in my mind how to testify here that I have felt, if I could not deserve that a gift beyond all gifts! I hope to work hard, to prove I do feel, as I say--it would be terrible to accomplish nothing now.

With which conviction--renewed conviction time by time, of your extravagance of kindness to me unworthy,--will it seem characteristically consistent when I pray you not to begin frightening me, all the same, with threats of writing _less_ kindly? That must not be, love, for _your_ sake now--if you had not thrown open those windows of heaven I should have no more imagined than that Syrian lord on whom the King leaned 'how such things might be'--but, once their influence showered, I should know, too soon and easily, if they shut up again! You have committed your dear, dearest self to that course of blessing, and blessing on, on, for ever--so let all be as it is, pray, _pray_!

No--not _all_. No more, ever, of that strange suspicion--'insolent'--oh, what a word!--nor suppose I shall particularly wonder at its being fancied applicable to _that_, of all other passages of your letter! It is quite as reasonable to suspect the existence of such a quality _there_ as elsewhere: how _can_ such a thing, _could_ such a thing come from you to me? But, dear Ba, _do_ you know me better! _Do_ feel that I know you, I am bold to believe, and that if you were to run at me with a pointed spear I should be sure it was a golden sanative, Machaon's touch, for my entire good, that I was opening my heart to receive! As for words, written or spoken--I, who sin forty times in a day by light words, and untrue to the thought, I am certainly not used to be easily offended by other peoples' words, people in the world. But _your_ words! And about the 'mission'; if it had not been a thing to jest at, I should not have begun, as I did--as you felt I did. I know now, what I only suspected then, and will tell you all the matter on Monday if you care to hear. The 'humanity' however, would have been unquestionable if I had chosen to exercise it towards the poor weak incapable creature that wants _somebody_, and urgently, I can well believe.

As for your apologue, it is naught--as you felt, and so broke off--for the baron knew well enough it was a spray of the magical tree which once planted in his domain would shoot up, and out, and all round, and be glorious with leaves and musical with birds' nests, and a fairy safeguard and blessing thenceforward and for ever, when the foolish baton had been broken into ounces of gold, even if gold it _were_, and spent and vanished: for, he said, such gold lies in the highway, men pick it up, more of it or less; but this one slip of the flowering tree is all of it on this side Paradise. Whereon he laid it to his heart and was happy--in spite of his disastrous chase the night before, when so far from catching an unicorn, he saw not even a respectable prize-heifer, worth the oil-cake and rape-seed it had doubtless cost to rear her--'insolence!'

I found no opportunity of speaking to Mr. K. about Monday, but nothing was said of last Wednesday, and he must know I did not go yesterday. So, Monday is laughing in sunshine surely! Bless you, my sweetest. I love you with my whole heart; ever shall love you.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

[Post-mark, February 24, 1846.]

Ever dearest, it is only when you go away, when you are quite gone, out of the house and the street, that I get up and think properly, and with the right gratitude of your flowers. Such beautiful flowers you brought me this time too! looking like summer itself, and smelling! Doing the 'honour due' to the flowers, makes your presence a little longer with me, the sun shines back over the hill just by that time, and then drops, till the next letter.

If I had had the letter on Saturday as ought to have been, no, I could _not_ have answered it so that you should have my answer on Sunday--no, I should still have had to write first.

Now you understand that I do not object to the writing first, but only to the hearing second. I would rather write than not--I! But to be written to is the chief gladness of course; and with all you say of liking to have my letters (which I like to hear quite enough indeed) you cannot pretend to think that _yours_ are not more to _me_, most to _me_! Ask my guardian-angel and hear what he says! Yours will look another way for shame of measuring joys with him! Because as I have said before, and as he says now, you are all to me, all the light, all the life; I am living for you now. And before I knew you, what was I and where? What was the world to me, do you think? and the meaning of life? And now, when you come and go, and write and do not write, all the hours are chequered accordingly in so many squares of white and black, as if for playing at fox and goose ... only there is no fox, and I will not agree to be goose for one ... _that_ is _you_ perhaps, for being 'too easily' satisfied.

So my claim is that you are more to me than I can be to you at any rate. Mr. Fox said on Sunday that I was a 'religious hermit' who wrote 'poems which ought to be read in a Gothic alcove'; and religious hermits, when they care to see visions, do it better, they all say, through fasting and flagellation and seclusion in dark places. St. Theresa, for instance, saw a clearer glory by such means, than your Sir Moses Montefiore through his hundred-guinea telescope. Think then, how every shadow of my life has helped to throw out into brighter, fuller significance, the light which comes to me from you ... think how it is the one light, seen without distractions.

_I_ was thinking the other day that certainly and after all (or rather before all) I had loved you all my life unawares, that is, the idea of you. Women begin for the most part, (if ever so very little given to reverie) by meaning, in an aside to themselves, to love such and such an ideal, seen sometimes in a dream and sometimes in a book, and forswearing their ancient faith as the years creep on. I say a book, because I remember a friend of mine who looked everywhere for the original of Mr. Ward's 'Tremaine,' because nothing would do for _her_, she insisted, except just _that_ excess of so-called refinement, with the book-knowledge and the conventional manners, (_loue qui peut_, Tremaine), and ended by marrying a lieutenant in the Navy who could not spell. Such things happen every day, and cannot be otherwise, say the wise:--and _this_ being otherwise with _me_ is miraculous compensation for the trials of many years, though such abundant, overabundant compensation, that I cannot help fearing it is too much, as I know that you are too good and too high for me, and that by the degree in which I am raised up you are let down, for us two to find a level to meet on. One's ideal must be above one, as a matter of course, you know. It is as far as one can reach with one's eyes (soul-eyes), not reach to touch. And here is mine ... shall I tell you? ... even to the visible outward sign of the black hair and the complexion (why you might ask my sisters!) yet I would not tell you, if I could not tell you afterwards that, if it had been red hair quite, it had been the same thing, only I prove the coincidence out fully and make you smile half.

Yet indeed I did not fancy that I was to love _you_ when you came to see me--no indeed ... any more than I did your caring on your side. My ambition when we began our correspondence, was simply that you should forget I was a woman (being weary and _blasée_ of the empty written gallantries, of which I have had my share and all the more perhaps from my peculiar position which made them so without consequence), that you should forget _that_ and let us be friends, and consent to teach me what you knew better than I, in art and human nature, and give me your sympathy in the meanwhile. I am a great hero-worshipper and had admired your poetry for years, and to feel that you liked to write to me and be written to was a pleasure and a pride, as I used to tell you I am sure, and then your letters were not like other letters, as I must not tell you again. Also you _influenced_ me, in a way in which no one else did. For instance, by two or three half words you made me see you, and other people had delivered orations on the same subject quite without effect. I surprised everybody in this house by consenting to see you. Then, when you came, you never went away. I mean I had a sense of your presence constantly. Yes ... and to prove how free that feeling was from the remotest presentiment of what has occurred, I said to Papa in my unconsciousness the next morning ... 'it is most extraordinary how the idea of Mr. Browning does beset me--I suppose it is not being used to see strangers, in some degree--but it haunts me ... it is a persecution.' On which he smiled and said that 'it was not grateful to my friend to use such a word.' When the letter came....

Do you know that all that time I was frightened of you? frightened in this way. I felt as if you had a power over me and meant to use it, and that I could not breathe or speak very differently from what you chose to make me. As to my thoughts, I had it in my head somehow that you read _them_ as you read the newspaper--examined them, and fastened them down writhing under your long entomological pins--ah, do you remember the entomology of it all?

But the power was used upon _me_--and I never doubted that you had mistaken your own mind, the strongest of us having some exceptional weakness. Turning the wonder round in all lights, I came to what you admitted yesterday ... yes, I saw _that_ very early ... that you had come here with the intention of trying to love whomever you should find, ... and also that what I had said about exaggerating the amount of what I could be to you, had just operated in making you more determined to justify your own presentiment in the face of mine. Well--and if that last clause was true a little, too ... why should I be sorry now ... and why should you have fancied for a moment, that the first could make me sorry. At first and when I did not believe that you really loved me, when I thought you deceived yourself, _then_, it was different. But now ... now ... when I see and believe your attachment for me, do you think that any cause in the world (except what diminished it) could render it less a source of joy to me? I mean as far as I myself am considered. Now if you ever fancy that I am _vain_ of your love for me, you will be unjust, remember. If it were less dear, and less above me, I might be vain perhaps. But I may say _before_ God and you, that of all the events of my life, inclusive of its afflictions, nothing has humbled me so much as your love. Right or wrong it may be, but true it _is_, and I tell you. Your love has been to me like God's own love, which makes the receivers of it kneelers.

Why all this should be written, I do not know--but you set me thinking yesterday in that backward line, which I lean back to very often, and for once, as you made me write directly, why I wrote, as my thoughts went, that way.

Say how you are, beloved--and do not brood over that 'Soul's Tragedy,' which I wish I had here with 'Luria,' because, so, you should not see it for a month at least. And take exercise and keep well--and remember how many letters I must have before Saturday. May God bless you. Do you want to hear me say

I cannot love you less...?

_That_ is a doubtful phrase. And

I cannot love you more

is doubtful too, for reasons I could give. More or less, I really love you, but it does not sound right, even _so_, does it? I know what it ought to be, and will put it into the 'seal' and the 'paper' with the ineffable other things.

Dearest, do not go to St. Petersburg. Do not think of going, for fear it should come true and you should go, and while you were helping the Jews and teaching Nicholas, what (in that case) would become of your

BA?

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Tuesday. [Post-mark, February 24, 1846.]

Ah, sweetest, in spite of our agreement, here is the note that sought not to go, but must--because, if there is no speaking of Mrs. Jamesons and such like without bringing in your dear name (not _dearest_ name, my Ba!) what is the good of not writing it down, now, when I, though possessed with the love of it no more than usual, yet _may_ speak, and to a hearer? And I have to thank you with all my heart for the good news of the increasing strength and less need for the opium--how I do thank you, my dearest--and desire to thank God through whose goodness it all is! This I could not but say now, to-morrow I will write at length, having been working a little this morning, with whatever effect. So now I will go out and see your elm-trees and gate, and think the thoughts over again, and coming home I shall perhaps find a letter.

Dearest, dearest--my perfect blessing you are!

May God continue his care for us. R.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Wednesday Morning. [Post-mark, February 25, 1846.]

Once you were pleased to say, my own Ba, that 'I made you do as I would.' I am quite sure, you make me _speak_ as you would, and not at all as I mean--and for one instance, I never surely spoke anything half so untrue as that 'I came with the intention of loving whomever I should find'--No! wreathed shells and hollows in ruins, and roofs of caves may transform a voice wonderfully, make more of it or less, or so change it as to almost alter, but turn a 'no' into a 'yes' can no echo (except the Irish one), and I said 'no' to such a charge, and still say 'no.' I _did_ have a presentiment--and though it is hardly possible for me to look back on it now without lending it the true colours given to it by the event, yet I _can_ put them aside, if I please, and remember that I not merely hoped it would not be so (_not_ that the effect I expected to be produced would be _less_ than in anticipation, certainly I did not hope _that_, but that it would range itself with the old feelings of simple reverence and sympathy and friendship, that I should love you as much as I supposed I _could_ love, and no more) but in the confidence that nothing could occur to divert me from my intended way of life, I made--went on making arrangements to return to Italy. You know--did I not tell you--I wished to see you before I returned? And I had heard of you just so much as seemed to make it impossible such a relation could ever exist. I know very well, if you choose to refer to my letters you may easily bring them to bear a sense in parts, more agreeable to your own theory than to mine, the true one--but that was instinct, Providence--anything rather than foresight. Now I will convince you! yourself have noticed the difference between the _letters_ and the _writer_; the greater 'distance of the latter from you,' why was that? Why, if not because the conduct _began_ with _him_, with one who had now seen you--was no continuation of the conduct, as influenced by the feeling, of the letters--else, they, if _near_, should have enabled him, if but in the natural course of time and with increase of familiarity, to become _nearer_--but it was not so! The letters began by loving you after their way--but what a world-wide difference between _that_ love and the true, the love from seeing and hearing and feeling, since you make me resolve, what now lies blended so harmoniously, into its component parts. Oh, I know what is old from what is new, and how chrystals may surround and glorify other vessels meant for ordinary service than Lord N's! But I _don't_ know that handling may not snap them off, some of the more delicate ones; and if you let me, love, I will not again, ever again, consider how it came and whence, and when, so curiously, so pryingly, but believe that it was always so, and that it all came at once, all the same; the more unlikelinesses the better, for they set off the better the truth of truths that here, ('how begot? how nourished?')--here is the whole wondrous Ba filling my whole heart and soul; and over-filling it, because she is in all the world, too, where I look, where I fancy. At the same time, because all is so wondrous and so sweet, do you think that it would be _so_ difficult for me to analyse it, and give causes to the effects in sufficiently numerous instances, even to 'justify my presentiment?' Ah, dear, dearest Ba, I could, could indeed, could account for all, or enough! But you are unconscious, I do believe, of your power, and the knowledge of it would be no added grace, perhaps! So let us go on--taking a lesson out of the world's book in a different sense. You shall think I love you for--(tell me, you must, what for) while in my secret heart I know what my 'mission of humanity' means, and what telescopic and microscopic views it procures me. Enough--Wait, one word about the 'too kind letters'--could not the same Montefiore understand that though he deserved not one of his thousand guineas, yet that he is in disgrace if they bate him of his next gift by merely _ten_? It _is_ all too kind--but I shall feel the diminishing of the kindness, be very sure! Of that there is, however, not too alarming a sign in this dearest, because last of all--dearest letter of all--till the next! I looked yesterday over the 'Tragedy,' and think it will do after all. I will bring one part at least next time, and 'Luria' take away, if you let me, so all will be off my mind, and April and May be the welcomer? Don't think I am going to take any extraordinary pains. There are some things in the 'Tragedy' I should like to preserve and print now, leaving the future to spring as it likes, in any direction, and these half-dead, half-alive works fetter it, if left behind.

Yet one thing will fetter it worse, only one thing--if _you_, in any respect, stay behind? You that in all else help me and will help me, beyond words--beyond dreams--if, because I find you, your own works _stop_--'then comes the Selah and the voice is hushed.' Oh, no, no, dearest, _so_ would the help cease to be help--the joy to be joy, Ba herself to be _quite_ Ba, and my own Siren singing song for song. Dear love, will that be kind, and right, and like the rest? Write and promise that all shall be resumed, the romance-poem chiefly, and I will try and feel more yours than ever now. Am I not with you in the world, proud of you--and _vain_, too, very likely, which is all the sweeter if it is a sin as you teach me. Indeed dearest, I have set my heart on your fulfilling your mission--my heart is on it! Bless you, my Ba--

Your R.B.

I am so well as to have resumed the shower-bath (this morning)--and I walk, especially near the elms and stile--and mean to walk, and be very well--and you, dearest?

_E.B.B. to R.B._

[Post-mark, February 26, 1846.]

I confess that while I was writing those words I had a thought that they were not quite yours as you said them. Still it comes to something in their likeness, but we will not talk of it and break off the chrystals--they _are_ so brittle, then? do you know _that_ by an 'instinct.' But I agree that it is best not to talk--I 'gave it up' as a riddle long ago. Let there be 'analysis' even, and it will not be solution. I have my own thoughts of course, and you have yours, and the worst is that a third person looking down on us from some snow-capped height, and free from personal influences, would have _his_ thoughts too, and _he_ would think that if you had been reasonable as usual you would have gone to Italy. I have by heart (or by head at least) what the third person would think. The third person thundered to me in an abstraction for ever so long, and at intervals I hear him still, only you shall not to-day, because he talks 'damnable iterations' and teazes you. Nay, the first person is teazing you now perhaps, without going any further, and yet I must go a little further, just to say (after accepting all possible unlikelinesses and miracles, because everything was miraculous and impossible) that it was agreed between us long since that you did not love me for anything--your having no reason for it is the only way of your not seeming unreasonable. Also _for my own sake_. I like it to be so--I cannot have peace with the least change from it. Dearest, take the baron's hawthorn bough which, in spite of his fine dream of it is dead since the other day, and so much the worse than when I despised it last--take that dead stick and push it upright into the sand as the tide rises, and the whole blue sea draws up its glittering breadth and length towards and around it. But what then? What does _that prove_? ... as the philosopher said of the poem. So we ought not to talk of such things; and we get warned off even in the accidental illustrations taken up to light us. Still, the stick certainly did not draw the sea.

Dearest and best you were yesterday, to write me the little note! You are better than the imaginations of my heart, and _they_, as far as they relate to you (not further) are _not_ desperately wicked, I think. I always expect the kindest things from you, and you always are doing some kindness beyond what is expected, and this is a miracle too, like the rest, now isn't it? When the knock came last night, I knew it was your letter, and not another's. Just another little leaf of my Koran! How I thank you ... thank you! If I write too kind letters, as you say, why they may be too kind for me to send, but not for you to receive; and I suppose I think more of you than of me, which accounts for my writing them, accounts and justifies. And _that_ is my reflection not now for the first time. For we break rules very often--as that exegetical third person might expound to you clearly out of the ninety-sixth volume of the 'Code of Conventions,' only you are not like another, nor have you been to me like another--you began with most improvident and (will you let me say?) _unmasculine_ generosity, and Queen Victoria does not sit upon a mat after the fashion of Queen Pomare, nor should.

But ... but ... you know very fully that you are breaking faith in the matter of the 'Tragedy' and 'Luria'--you promised to rest--and _you rest for three days_. Is it _so_ that people get well? or keep well? Indeed I do not think I shall let you have 'Luria.' Ah--be careful, I do beseech you--be careful. There is time for a pause, and the works will profit by it themselves. And _you_! And I ... if you are ill!--

For the rest I will let you walk in my field, and see my elms as much as you please ... though I hear about the shower bath with a little suspicion. Why, if it did you harm before, should it not again? and why should you use it, if it threatens harm? Now tell me if it hasn't made you rather unwell since the new trial!--tell me, dear, dearest.

As for myself, I believe that you set about exhorting me to be busy, just that I might not reproach _you_ for the over-business. Confess that _that_ was the only meaning of the exhortation. But no, you are quite serious, you say. You even threaten me in a sort of underground murmur, which sounds like a nascent earthquake; and if I do not write so much a day directly, your stipendiary magistrateship will take away my license to be loved ... I am not to be Ba to you any longer ... you say! And is _this_ right? now I ask you. Ever so many chrystals fell off by that stroke of the baton, I do assure you. Only you did not mean quite what you said so too articulately, and you will unsay it, if you please, and unthink it near the elms.

As for the writing, I will write ... I have written ... I am writing. You do not fancy that I have given up writing?--No. Only I have certainly been more loitering and distracted than usual in what I have done, which is not my fault--nor yours directly--and I feel an indisposition to setting about the romance, the hand of the soul shakes. I am too happy and not calm enough, I suppose, to have the right inclination. Well--it will come. But all in blots and fragments there are verses enough, to fill a volume done in the last year.

And if there were not ... if there were none ... I hold that I should be Ba, and also _your_ Ba ... which is 'insolence' ... will you say?

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Thursday. [Post-mark, February 26, 1846.]

As for the 'third person,' my sweet Ba, he was a wise speaker from the beginning; and in our case he will say, turning to me--'the late Robert Hall--when a friend admired that one with so high an estimate of the value of intellectuality in woman should yet marry some kind of cook-maid animal, as did the said Robert; wisely answered, "you can't kiss Mind"! May _you_ not discover eventually,' (this is to me) 'that mere intellectual endowments--though incontestably of the loftiest character--mere Mind, though that Mind be Miss B's--cannot be _kissed_--nor, repent too late the absence of those humbler qualities, those softer affections which, like flowerets at the mountain's foot, if not so proudly soaring as, as, as!...' and so on, till one of us died, with laughing or being laughed at! So judges the third person! and if, to help him, we let him into your room at Wimpole Street, suffered him to see with Flush's eyes, he would say with just as wise an air 'True, mere personal affections may be warm enough, but does it augur well for the durability of an attachment that it should be _wholly, exclusively_ based on such perishable attractions as the sweetness of a mouth, the beauty of an eye? I could wish, rather, to know that there was something of less transitory nature co-existent with this--some congeniality of Mental pursuit, some--' Would he not say that? But I can't do his platitudes justice because here is our post going out and I have been all the morning walking in the perfect joy of my heart, with your letter, and under its blessing--dearest, dearest Ba--let me say more to-morrow--only this now, that you--ah, what are you not to me! My dearest love, bless you--till to-morrow when I will strengthen the prayer; (no, _lengthen_ it!)

Ever your own.

'Hawthorn'[1]--to show how Spring gets on!

[Footnote 1: Sprig of Hawthorn enclosed with letter.]

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Thursday Evening. [Post-mark, February 27, 1846.]

If all third persons were as foolish as this third person of yours, ever dearest, first and second persons might follow their own devices without losing much in the way of good counsel. But you are unlucky in your third person as far as the wits go, he talks a great deal of nonsense, and Flush, who is sensible, will have nothing to do with him, he says, any more than you will with Sir Moses:--he is quite a third person _singular_ for the nonsense he talks!

So, instead of him, you shall hear what I have been doing to-day. The sun, which drew out you and the hawthorns, persuaded me that it was warm enough to go down-stairs--and I put on my cloak as if I were going into the snow, and went into the drawing-room and took Henrietta by surprise as she sate at the piano singing. Well, I meant to stay half an hour and come back again, for I am upon 'Tinkler's ground' in the drawing-room and liable to whole droves of morning visitors--and Henrietta kept me, kept me, because she wanted me, besought me, to stay and see the great sight of Capt. Surtees Cook--_plus_ his regimentals--fresh from the royal presence at St. James's, and I never saw him in my life, though he is a sort of cousin. So, though I hated it as you may think, ... not liking to be unkind to my sister, I stayed and stayed one ten minutes after another, till it seemed plain that he wasn't coming at all (as I told her) and that Victoria had kept him to dinner, enchanted with the regimentals. And half laughing and half quarrelling, still she kept me by force, until a knock came most significantly ... and '_There_ is Surtees' said she ... 'now you must and shall stay! So foolish,' (I had my hand on the door-handle to go out) 'he, your own cousin too! who always calls you Ba, except before Papa.' Which might have encouraged me perhaps, but I can't be sure of it, as the very next moment apprized us both that no less a person than Mrs. Jameson was standing out in the passage. The whole 36th. regiment could scarcely have been more astounding to me. As to staying to see her in that room, with the prospect of the military descent in combination, I couldn't have done it for the world! so I made Henrietta, who had drawn me into the scrape, take her up-stairs, and followed myself in a minute or two--and the corollary of this interesting history is, that being able to talk at all after all that 'fuss,' and after walking 'up-stairs and down-stairs' like the ancestor of your spider, proves my gigantic strength--now doesn't it?

For the rest, 'here be proofs' that the first person can be as foolish as any third person in the world. What do you think?

And Mrs. Jameson was kind beyond speaking of, and talked of taking me to Italy. What do you say? It is somewhere about the fifth or sixth proposition of the sort which has come to me. I shall be embarrassed, it seems to me, by the multitude of escorts to Italy. But the kindness, one cannot laugh at so much kindness.

I wanted to hear her speak of you, and was afraid. I _could not_ name you. Yet I _did_ want to hear the last 'Bell' praised.

She goes to Ireland for two months soon, but prints a book first, a collection of essays. I have not seen Mr. Kenyon, with whom she dined yesterday. The Macreadys were to be there, and he told me a week ago that he very nearly committed himself in a 'social mistake' by inviting you to meet them.

Ah my hawthorn spray! Do you know, I caught myself pitying it for being gathered, with that green promise of leaves on it! There is room too on it for the feet of a bird! Still I shall keep it longer than it would have stayed in the hedge, _that_ is certain!

The first you ever gave me was a yellow rose sent in a letter, and shall I tell you what _that_ means--the yellow rose? '_Infidelity_,' says the dictionary of flowers. You see what an omen, ... to begin with!

Also you see that I am not tired with the great avatar to-day--the 'fell swoop' rather--mine, into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Jameson's on _me_.

And I shall hear to-morrow again, really? I '_let_' you. And you are best, kindest, dearest, every day. Did I ever tell you that you made me do what you choose? I fancied that I only _thought_ so. May God bless you. I am your own.

Shall I have the 'Soul's Tragedy' on Saturday?--any of it? But _do not work_--I beseech you to take care.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

[Post-mark, February 27, 1846.]

To be sure my 'first person' was nonsensical, and, in that respect made speak properly, I hope, only he was cut short in the middle of his performance by the exigencies of the post. So, never mind what such persons say, my sweetest, because they know nothing at all--_quod erat demonstrandum_. But you, love, you speak roses, and hawthorn-blossoms when you tell me of the cloak put on, and the descent, and the entry, and staying and delaying. I will have had a hand in all that; I know what I wished all the morning, and now this much came true! But you should have seen the regimentals, if I could have so contrived it, for I confess to a Chinese love for bright red--the very names 'vermilion' 'scarlet' warm me, yet in this cold climate nobody wears red to comfort one's eye save soldiers and fox hunters, and old women fresh from a Parish Christmas Distribution of cloaks. To dress in floating loose crimson silk, I almost understand being a Cardinal! Do you know anything of Nat Lee's Tragedies? In one of them a man angry with a Cardinal cries--

Stand back, and let me mow this poppy down, This rank red weed that spoils the Churches' corn.

Is not that good? and presently, when the same worthy is poisoned (that is the Cardinal)--they bid him--'now, Cardinal, lie down and roar!'

Think of thy scarlet sins!

Of the justice of all which, you will judge with no Mrs. Jameson for guide when we see the Sistina together, I trust! By the way, yesterday I went to Dulwich to see some pictures, by old Teniers, Murillo, Gainsborough, Raphael!--then twenty names about, and last but one, as if just thought of, 'Correggio.' The whole collection, including 'a _divine_ picture by Murillo,' and Titian's Daughter (hitherto supposed to be in the Louvre)--the whole I would, I think, have cheerfully given a pound or two for the privilege of not possessing--so execrable as sign-paintings even! 'Are there worse poets in their way than painters?' Yet the melancholy business is here--that the bad poet goes out of his way, writes his verses in the language he learned in order to do a hundred other things with it, all of which he can go on and do afterwards--but the painter has spent the best of his life in learning even how to produce such monstrosities as these, and to what other good do his acquisitions go? This short minute of life our one chance, an eternity on either side! and a man does not walk whistling and ruddy by the side of hawthorn hedges in spring, but shuts himself up and conies out after a dozen years with 'Titian's Daughter' and, there, gone is his life, let somebody else try!

I have tried--my trial is made too!

To-morrow you shall tell me, dearest, that Mrs. Jameson wondered to see you so well--did she not wonder? Ah, to-morrow! There is a lesson from all this writing and mistaking and correcting and being corrected; and what, but that a word goes safely only from lip to lip, dearest? See how the cup slipped from the lip and snapped the chrystals, you say! But the writing is but for a time--'a time and times and half a time!'--would I knew when the prophetic weeks end! Still, one day, as I say, no more writing, (and great scandalization of the third person, peeping through the fringes of Flush's ears!) meanwhile, I wonder whether if I meet Mrs. Jameson I may practise diplomacy and say carelessly 'I should be glad to know what Miss B. is like--' No, that I must not do, something tells me, 'for reasons, for reasons'--

I do not know--you may perhaps have to wait a little longer for my 'divine Murillo' of a Tragedy. My sister is copying it as I give the pages, but--in fact my wise head does ache a little--it is inconceivable! As if it took a great storm to topple over some stone, and once the stone pushed from its right place, any bird's foot, which would hardly bend the hawthorn spray, may set it trembling! The aching begins with reading the presentation-list at the Drawing-room quite naturally, and with no shame at all! But it is gentle, well-behaved aching now, so I _do_ care, as you bid me, Ba, my Ba, whom I call Ba to my heart but could not, I really believe, call so before another, even your sister, if--if--

But Ba, I call you boldly here, and I dare kiss your dear, dear eyes, till to-morrow--Bless you, my own.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Sunday. [Post-mark, March 2, 1846.]

You never could think that I meant any insinuation against you by a word of what was said yesterday, or that I sought or am likely to seek a 'security'! do you know it was not right of you to use such an expression--indeed no. You were angry with me for just one minute, or you would not have used it--and why? Now what did I say that was wrong or unkind even by construction? If I did say anything, it was three times wrong, and unjust as well as unkind, and wronged my own heart and consciousness of all that you are to me, more than it could _you_. But you began speaking of yourself just as a woman might speak under the same circumstances (you remember what you said), and then _I_, remembering that all the men in the world would laugh such an idea to scorn, said something to that effect, you _know_. I once was in company with a man, however, who valued himself very much on his constancy to a woman who was so deeply affected by it that she became his wife at last ... and the whole neighbourhood came out to stare at him on that ground as a sort of monster. And can you guess what the constancy meant? Seven years before, he loved that woman, he said, and she repulsed him. 'And in the meantime, _how many_?' I had the impertinence to ask a female friend who told me the tale. 'Why,' she answered with the utmost simplicity, 'I understand that Miss A. and Miss B. and Mrs. C. would not listen to him, but he took Miss D.'s rejection most to heart.' That was the head and front of his 'constancy' to Miss E., who had been loved, she boasted, for seven years ... that is, once at the beginning and once at the end. It was just a coincidence of the 'premier pas' and the 'pis aller.'

Beloved, I could not mean this for you; you are not made of such stuff, as we both know.

And for myself, it was my compromise with my own scruples, that you should not be 'chained' to me, not in the merest metaphor, that you should not seem to be bound, in honour or otherwise, so that if you stayed with me it should be your free choice to stay, not the _consequence_ of a choice so many months before. That was my compromise with my scruples, and not my doubt of your affection--and least of all, was it an intention of trifling with you sooner or later that made me wish to suspend all _decisions_ as long as possible. I have decided (for me) to let it be as you shall please--now I told you that before. Either we will live on as we are, until an obstacle arises,--for indeed I do not look for a 'security' where you suppose, and the very appearance of it _there_, is what most rebuts me--or I will be yours in the obvious way, to go out of England the next half-hour if possible. As to the steps to be taken (or not taken) before the last step, we must think of those. The worst is that the only question is about a _form_. Virtually the evil is the same all round, whatever we do. Dearest, it was plain to see yesterday evening when he came into this room for a moment at seven o'clock, before going to his own to dress for dinner ... plain to see, that he was not altogether pleased at finding you here in the morning. There was no pretext for objecting gravely--but it was plain that he was not pleased. Do not let this make you uncomfortable, he will forget all about it, and I was not _scolded_, do you understand. It was more manner, but my sisters thought as I did of the significance:--and it was enough to prove to me (if I had not known) what a desperate game we should be playing if we depended on a yielding nerve _there_.

And to-day I went down-stairs (to prove how my promises stand) though I could find at least ten good excuses for remaining in my own room, for our cousin, Sam Barrett, who brought the interruption yesterday and put me out of humour (it wasn't the fault of the dear little cousin, Lizzie ... my 'portrait' ... who was '_so_ sorry,' she said, dear child, to have missed Papa somewhere on the stairs!) the cousin who should have been in Brittany yesterday instead of here, sate in the drawing-room all this morning, and had visitors there, and so I had excellent excuses for never moving from my chair. Yet, the field being clear at _half-past two_! I went for half an hour, just--just for _you_. Did you think of me, I wonder? It was to meet your thoughts that I went, dear dearest.

How clever these sketches are. The expression produced by such apparently inadequate means is quite striking; and I have been making my brothers admire them, and they 'wonder you don't think of employing them in an illustrated edition of your works.' Which might be, really! Ah, you did not ask for 'Luria'! Not that I should have let you have it!--I think I should not indeed. Dearest, you take care of the head ... and don't make that tragedy of the soul one for mine, by letting it make you ill. Beware too of the shower-bath--it plainly does not answer for you at this season. And walk, and think of me for _your_ good, if such a combination should be possible.

And _I_ think of _you_ ... if I do not of Italy. Yet I forget to speak to you of the Dulwich Gallery. I never saw those pictures, but am astonished that the whole world should be wrong in praising them. 'Divine' is a bad word for Murillo in any case--because he is intensely human in his most supernatural subjects. His beautiful Trinity in the National Gallery, which I saw the last time I went out to look at pictures, has no deity in it--and I seem to see it now. And do you remember the visitation of the angels to Abraham (the Duke of Sutherland's picture--is it not?) where the mystic visitors look like shepherds who had not even dreamt of God? But I always understood that that Dulwich Gallery was famous for great works--you surprise me! And for painters ... their badness is more ostentatious than that of poets--they stare idiocy out of the walls, and set the eyes of sensitive men on edge. For the rest, however, I very much doubt whether they wear their lives more to rags, than writers who mistake their vocation in poetry do. There is a mechanism in poetry as in the other art--and, to men not native to the way of it, it runs hard and heavily. The 'cudgelling of the brain' is as good labour as the grinding of the colours, ... do you not think?

If ever I am in the Sistine Chapel, it will not be with Mrs. Jameson--no. If ever I should be there, what teaching I shall want, _I_ who have seen so few pictures, and love them only as children do, with an unlearned love, just for the sake of the thoughts they bring. Wonderfully ignorant I am, to have had eyes and ears so long! There is music, now, which lifts the hair on my head, I feel it so much, ... yet all I know of it as art, all I have heard of the works of the masters in it, has been the mere sign and suggestion, such as the private piano may give. I never heard an oratorio, for instance, in my life--judge by _that_! It is a guess, I make, at all the greatness and divinity ... feeling in it, though, distinctly and certainly, that a composer like Beethoven _must_ stand above the divinest painter in soul-godhead, and nearest to the true poet, of all artists. And this I felt in my guess, long before I knew you. But observe how, if I had died in this illness, I should have left a sealed world behind me! _you_, unknown too--unguessed at, _you_, ... in many respects, wonderfully unguessed at! Lately I have learnt to despise my own instincts. And apart from those--and _you_, ... it was right for me to be melancholy, in the consciousness of passing blindfolded under all the world-stars, and of going out into another side of the creation, with a blank for the experience of this ... the last revelation, unread! How the thought of it used to depress me sometimes!

Talking of music, I had a proposition the other day from certain of Mr. Russell's (the singer's) friends, about his setting to music my 'Cry of the Children.' His programme exhibits all the horrors of the world, I see! Lifeboats ... madhouses ... gamblers' wives ... all done to the right sort of moaning. His audiences must go home delightfully miserable, I should fancy. He has set the 'Song of the Shirt' ... and my 'Cry of the Children' will be acceptable, it is supposed, as a climax of agony. Do you know this Mr. Russell, and what sort of music he suits to his melancholy? But to turn my 'Cry' to a 'Song,' a burden, it is said, is required--he can't sing it without a burden! and behold what has been sent 'for my approval'.... I shall copy it _verbatim_ for you....

And the threads twirl, twirl, twirl, Before each boy and girl; And the wheels, big and little, still whirl, whirl, whirl.

... accompaniment _agitato_, imitating the roar of the machinery!

This is not endurable ... ought not to be ... should it now? Do tell me.

May God bless you, very dearest! Let me hear how you are--and think how I am

Your own....

_R.B. to E.B.B._

[Post-mark, March 2, 1846.]

Dearest, I have been kept in town and just return in time to say why you have _no_ note ... to-morrow I will write ... so much there is to say on the subject of this letter I find.

Bless you, all beloved--

R.B.

Oh, do not sleep another night on that horrible error I have led you into! The 'Dulwich Gallery'!--!!!--oh, no. Only some pictures to be sold at the Greyhound Inn, Dulwich--'the genuine property of a gentleman deceased.'

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Sunday Evening. [Post-mark, March 2, 1846.]

One or two words, if no more, I must write to dearest Ba, the night would go down in double blackness if I had neither written nor been written to! So here is another piece of 'kindness' on my part, such as I have received praise for of late! My own sweetest, there is just this good in such praise, that by it one comes to something pleasantly definite amid the hazy uncertainties of mere wishes and possibilities--while my whole heart does, _does_ so yearn, love, to do something to prove its devotion for you; and, now and then, amuses itself with foolish imaginings of real substantial services to which it should be found equal if fortune so granted; suddenly you interpose with thanks, in such terms as would all too much reward the highest of even those services which are never to be; and for what?--for a note, a going to Town, a ----! Well, there are definite beginnings certainly, if you will recognise them--I mean, that since you _do_ accept, far from 'despising this day of small things,' then I may take heart, and be sure that even though none of the great achievements should fall to my happy chance, still the barrenest, flattest life will--_must_ of needs produce in its season better fruits than these poor ones--I keep it, value it, now, that it may produce such.

Also I determine never again to 'analyse,' nor let you analyse if the sweet mouth can be anyway stopped: the love shall be one and indivisible--and the Loves we used to know from

One another huddled lie ... Close beside Her tenderly--

(which is surely the next line). Now am I not anxious to know what your father said? And if anybody else said or wondered ... how should I know? Of all fighting--the warfare with shadows--what a work is _there_. But tell me,--and, with you for me--

Bless me dearest ever, as the face above mine blesses me--

Your own

Sir Moses set off this morning, I hear--somebody yesterday called the telescope an 'optical delusion,' anticipating many more of the kind! So much for this 'wandering Jew.'

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Monday Evening. [Post-mark, March 3, 1846.]

Upon the whole, I think, I am glad when you are kept in town and prevented from writing what you call 'much' to me. Because in the first place, the little from _you_, is always much to _me_--and then, besides, _the letter comes_, and with it the promise of another! Two letters have I had from you to-day, ever dearest! How I thank you!--yes, _indeed_! It was like yourself to write yesterday ... to remember what a great gap there would have been otherwise, as it looked on this side--here. The worst of Saturday is (when you come on it) that Sunday follows--Saturday night bringing no letter. Well, it was very good of you, best of you!

For the 'analyzing' I give it up willingly, only that I must say what altogether I forgot to say in my last letter, that it was not _I_, if you please, who spoke of the chrystals breaking away! And you, to quote me with that certainty! "The chrystals are broken off," _you say_.' _I_ say!! When it was in your letter, and not at all in mine!!

The truth is that I was stupid, rather, about the Dulwich collection--it was my fault. I caught up the idea of the gallery out of a heap of other thoughts, and really might have known better if I had given myself a chance, by considering.

Mr. Kenyon came to-day, and has taken out a licence, it seems to me, for praising you, for he praised and praised. Somebody has told him (who had spent several days with you in a house with a large library) that he came away 'quite astounded by the versatility of your learning'--and that, to complete the circle, you discoursed as scientifically on the training of greyhounds and breeding of ducks as if you had never done anything else all your life. Then dear Mr. Kenyon talked of the poems; and hoped, very earnestly I am sure, that you would finish 'Saul'--which you ought to do, must do--_only not now_. By the way Mrs. Coleridge had written to him to enquire whether you had authority for the 'blue lilies,' rather than white. Then he asked about 'Luria' and 'whether it was obscure'; and I said, not unless the people, who considered it, began by blindfolding themselves.

And where do you think Mr. Kenyon talks of going next February--a long while off to be sure? To Italy of course. Everybody I ever heard of seems to be going to Italy next winter. He visits his brother at Vienna, and 'may cross the Alps and get to Pisa'--it is the shadow of a scheme--nothing certain, so far.

I did not go down-stairs to-day because the wind blew and the thermometer fell. To-morrow, perhaps I may. And _you_, dearest dearest, might have put into the letters how you were when you wrote them. You might--but you did not feel well and would not say so. Confess that that was the reason. Reason or no reason, mention yourself to-morrow, and for the rest, do not write a long letter so as to increase the evil. There was nothing which I can remember as requiring an answer in what I wrote to you, and though I _will_ have my letter of course, it shall be as brief as possible, if briefness is good for you--_now always remember that_. Why if I, who talk against 'Luria,' should work the mischief myself, what should I deserve? I should be my own jury directly and not recommend to mercy ... not to mine. Do take care--care for _me_ just so much.

And, except that taking care of your health, what would you do for me that you have not done? You have given me the best of the possible gifts of one human soul to another, you have made my life new, and am I to count these things as small and insufficient? Ah, you _know_, you _know_ that I cannot, ought not, will not.

May God bless you. He blesses me in letting me be grateful to you as your Ba.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Tuesday. [Post-mark, March 3, 1846.]

First and most important of all,--dearest, 'angry'--with you, and for _that_! It is just as if I had spoken contemptuously of that Gallery I so love and so am grateful to--having been used to go there when a child, far under the age allowed by the regulations--those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob's vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music-lesson group, all the Poussins with the 'Armida' and 'Jupiter's nursing'--and--no end to 'ands'--I have sate before one, some _one_ of those pictures I had predetermined to see, a good hour and then gone away ... it used to be a green half-hour's walk over the fields. So much for one error, now for the second like unto it; what I meant by charging you with _seeing_, (not, _not_ '_looking_ for')--_seeing_ undue 'security' in _that_, in the form,--I meant to say 'you talk about me being 'free' now, free till _then_, and I am rather jealous of the potency attributed to the _form_, with all its solemnity, because it _is_ a form, and no more--yet you frankly agree with me that _that_ form complied with, there is no redemption; yours I am _then_ sure enough, to repent at leisure &c. &c.' So I meant to ask, 'then, all _now_ said, all short of that particular form of saying it, all goes for comparatively nothing'? Here it is written down--you 'wish to _suspend_ all decisions as long as possible'--_that_ form effects the decision, then,--till then, 'where am I'? Which is just what Lord Chesterfield cautions people against asking when they tell stories. Love, Ba, my own heart's dearest, if all is _not_ decided _now_--why--hear a story, à propos of storytelling, and deduce what is deducible. A very old Unitarian minister met a still older evangelical brother--John Clayton (from whose son's mouth I heard what you shall hear)--the two fell to argument about the true faith to be held--after words enough, 'Well,' said the Unitarian, as winding up the controversy with an amicable smile--'at least let us hope we are both engaged in the _pursuit_ of Truth!'--'_Pursuit_ do you say?' cried the other, 'here am I with my years eighty and odd--if I haven't _found_ Truth by this time where is my chance, pray?' My own Ba, if I have not already _decided_, alas for me and the solemn words that are to help! Though in another point of view there would be some luxurious feeling, beyond the ordinary, in knowing one was kept safe to one's heart's good by yet another wall than the hitherto recognised ones. Is there any parallel in the notion I once heard a man deliver himself of in the street--a labourer talking with his friends about '_wishes_'--and this one wished, if he might get his wish, 'to have a nine gallon cask of strong ale set running that minute and his own mouth to be _tied_ under it'--the exquisiteness of the delight was to be in the security upon security,--the being 'tied.' Now, Ba says I shall not be 'chained' if she can help!

But now--here all the jesting goes. You tell me what was observed in the 'moment's' visit; by you, and (after, I suppose) by your sisters. First, I _will_ always see with your eyes _there_--next, what I see I will _never_ speak, if it pain you; but just this much truth I ought to say, I think. I always give myself to you for the worst I am,--full of faults as you will find, if you have not found them. But I _will_ not affect to be so bad, so wicked, as I count wickedness, as to call that conduct other than intolerable--_there_, in my conviction of _that_, is your real 'security' and mine for the future as the present. That a father choosing to give out of his whole day some five minutes to a daughter, supposed to be prevented from participating in what he, probably, in common with the whole world of sensible men, as distinguished from poets and dreamers, consider _every_ pleasure of life, by a complete foregoing of society--that he, after the Pisa business and the enforced continuance, and as he must believe, permanence of this state in which any other human being would go mad--I do dare say, for the justification of God, who gave the mind to be _used_ in this world,--where it saves us, we are taught, or destroys us,--and not to be sunk quietly, overlooked, and forgotten; that, under these circumstances, finding ... what, you say, unless he thinks he _does_ find, he would close the door of his house instantly; a mere sympathizing man, of the same literary tastes, who comes good-naturedly, on a proper and unexceptionable introduction, to chat with and amuse a little that invalid daughter, once a month, so far as is known, for an hour perhaps,--that such a father should show himself '_not pleased_ plainly,' at such a circumstance ... my Ba, it is SHOCKING! See, I go _wholly_ on the supposition that the real relation is not imagined to exist between us. I so completely could understand a repugnance to trust you to me were the truth known, that, I will confess, I have several times been afraid the very reverse of this occurrence would befall; that your father would have at some time or other thought himself obliged, by the usual feeling of people in such cases, to see me for a few minutes and express some commonplace thanks after the customary mode (just as Capt. Domett sent a heap of unnecessary thanks to me not long ago for sending now a letter now a book to his son in New Zealand--keeping up the spirits of poor dear Alfred now he is cut off from the world at large)--and if _this_ had been done, I shall not deny that my heart would have accused me--unreasonably I _know_ but still, suppression, and reserve, and apprehension--the whole of _that is_ horrible always! But this way of looking on the endeavour of anybody, however humble, to just preserve your life, remedy in some degree the first, if it _was_ the first, unjustifiable measure,--this being 'displeased'--is exactly what I did _not_ calculate upon. Observe, that in this _only_ instance I am able to do as I shall be done by; to take up the arms furnished by the world, the usages of society--this is monstrous on the _world's_ showing! I say this now that I may never need recur to it--that you may understand why I keep _such_ entire silence henceforth.

Get but well, keep but _as_ well, and all is easy now. This wonderful winter--the spring--the summer--you will take exercise, go up and down stairs, get strong. _I pray you, at your feet, to do this, dearest!_ Then comes Autumn, with the natural expectations, as after _rouge_ one expects _noir_: the _likelihood_ of a _severe_ winter after this mild one, which to prevent, you reiterate your demand to go and save your life in Italy, ought you not to do that? And the matters brought to issue, (with even, if possible, less shadow of ground for a refusal than before, if you are _well_, plainly well enough to bear the voyage) _there_ I _will_ bid you 'be mine in the obvious way'--if you shall preserve your belief in me--and you _may_ in much, in all important to you. Mr. Kenyon's praise is undeserved enough, but yesterday Milnes said I was the only literary man he ever knew, _tenax propositi_, able to make out a life for himself and abide in it--'for,' he went on, 'you really do live without any of this _titillation_ and fussy dependence upon adventitious excitement of all kinds, they all say they can do without.' That is _more_ true--and I _intend_ by God's help to live wholly for you; to spend my whole energies in reducing to practice the feeling which occupies me, and in the practical operation of which, the other work I had proposed to do will be found included, facilitated--I shall be able--but of this there is plenty time to speak hereafter--I shall, I believe, be able to do this without even allowing the world to _very much_ misinterpret--against pure lying there is no defence, but all up to that I hope to hinder or render unimportant--as you shall know in time and place.

I have written myself grave, but write to _me_, dear, dearest, and I will answer in a lighter mood--even now I can say how it was yesterday's hurry happened. I called on Milnes--who told me Hanmer had broken a bone in his leg and was laid up, so I called on him too--on Moxon, by the way, (his brother telling me strangely cheering news, from the grimmest of faces, about my books selling and likely to sell ... your wishes, Ba!)--then in Bond Street about some business with somebody, then on Mrs. Montagu who was out walking all the time, and home too. I found a letter from Mr. Kenyon, perfectly kind, asking me to go on Monday to meet friends, and with yours to-day comes another confirming the choice of the day. How entirely kind he is!

I am very well, much better, indeed--taking that bath with sensibly good effect, to-night I go to Montagu's again; for shame, having kept away too long.

And the rest shall answer _yours_--dear! Not 'much to answer?' And Beethoven, and Painting and--what _is_ the rest and shall be answered! Bless you, now, my darling--I love you, ever shall love you, ever be your own.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Tuesday Evening. [Post-mark, March 4, 1846.]

Yes, but, dearest, you mistake me, or you mistake yourself. I am sure I do not over-care for forms--it is not my way to do it--and in this case ... no. Still you must see that here is a fact as well as a form, and involving a frightful quantity of social inconvenience (to use the mildest word) if too hastily entered on. I deny altogether looking for, or 'seeing' any 'security' in it for myself--it is a mere form for the heart and the happiness: illusions may pass after as before. Still the truth is that if they were to pass with you now, you stand free to act according to the wide-awakeness of your eyes, and to reform your choice ... see! whereas afterward you could not carry out such a reformation while I was alive, even if I helped you. All I could do for you would be to walk away. And you pretend not to see this broad distinction?--ah. For me I have seen just this and no more, and have felt averse to forestall, to seem to forestall even by an hour, or a word, that stringency of the legal obligation from which there _is_ in a certain sense no redemption. Tie up your drinker under the pour of his nine gallons, and in two minutes he will moan and writhe (as you perfectly know) like a Brinvilliers under the water-torture. That he _asked_ to be tied up, was unwise on his own principle of loving ale. And _you_ sha'n't be 'chained' up, if you were to ask twenty times: if you have found truth or not in the water-well.

You do not see aright what I meant to tell you on another subject. If he was displeased, (and it was expressed by a shadow a mere negation of pleasure) it was not with you as a visitor and my friend. You must not fancy such a thing. It was a sort of instinctive indisposition towards seeing you here--unexplained to himself, I have no doubt--of course unexplained, or he would have desired me to receive you never again, _that_ would have been done at once and unscrupulously. But without defining his own feeling, he rather disliked seeing you here--it just touched one of his vibratory wires, brushed by and touched it--oh, we understand in this house. He is not a nice observer, but, at intervals very wide, he is subject to lightnings--call them fancies, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. Certainly it was not in the character of a 'sympathising friend' that you made him a very little cross on Monday. And yet you never were nor will be in danger of being _thanked_, he would not think of it. For the reserve, the apprehension--dreadful those things are, and desecrating to one's own nature--but we did not make this position, we only endure it. The root of the evil is the miserable misconception of the limits and character of parental rights--it is a mistake of the intellect rather than of the heart. Then, after using one's children as one's chattels for a time, the children drop lower and lower toward the level of the chattels, and the duties of human sympathy to them become difficult in proportion. And (it seems strange to say it, yet it is true) _love_, he does not conceive of at all. He has feeling, he can be moved deeply, he is capable of affection in a peculiar way, but _that_, he does not understand, any more than he understands Chaldee, respecting it less of course.

And you fancy that I could propose Italy again? after saying too that I never would? Oh no, no--yet there is time to think of this, a superfluity of time, ... 'time, times and half a time' and to make one's head swim with leaning over a precipice is not wise. The roar of the world comes up too, as you hear and as I heard from the beginning. There will be no lack of 'lying,' be sure--'pure lying' too--and nothing you can do, dearest dearest, shall hinder my being torn to pieces by most of the particularly affectionate friends I have in the world. Which I do not think of much, any more than of Italy. You will be mad, and I shall be bad ... and _that_ will be the effect of being poets! 'Till when, where are you?'--why in the very deepest of my soul--wherever in it is the fountain head of loving! beloved, _there_ you are!

Some day I shall ask you 'in form,'--as I care so much for forms, it seems,--what your 'faults' are, these immense multitudinous faults of yours, which I hear such talk of, and never, never, can get to see. Will you give me a catalogue raisonnée of your faults? I should like it, I think. In the meantime they seem to be faults of obscurity, that is, invisible faults, like those in the poetry which do not keep it from selling as I am _so, so_ glad to understand. I am glad too that Mr. Milnes knows you a little.

Now I must end, there is no more time to-night. God bless you, very dearest! Keep better ... try to be well--as _I_ do for you since you ask me. Did I ever think that _you_ would think it worth while to ask me _that_? What a dream! reaching out into the morning! To-day however I did not go down-stairs, because it was colder and the wind blew its way into the passages:--if I can to-morrow without risk, I will, ... be sure ... be sure. Till Thursday then!--till eternity!

'Till when, where am I,' but with you? and what, but yours

Your

BA.

I have been writing 'autographs' (save my _mark_) for the North and the South to-day ... the Fens, and Golden Square. Somebody asked for a verse, ... from either 'Catarina' or 'Flush' ... 'those poems' &c. &c.! Such a concatenation of criticisms. So I preferred Flush of course--i.e. gave him the preferment.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Wednesday Morning. [Post-mark, March 4, 1846.]

Ah, sweetest, don't mind people and their lies any more than I shall; if the toad _does_ 'take it into his toad's head to spit at you'--you will not 'drop dead,' I warrant. All the same, if one may make a circuit through a flower-bed and see the less of his toad-habits and general ugliness, so much the better--no words can express my entire indifference (far below _contempt_) for what can be said or done. But one thing, only one, I choose to hinder being said, if I can--the others I would not if I could--why prevent the toad's puffing himself out thrice his black bigness if it amuses him among those wet stones? We shall be in the sun.

I dare say I am unjust--hasty certainly, in the other matter--but all faults are such inasmuch as they are 'mistakes of the intellect'--toads may spit or leave it alone,--but if I ever see it right, exercising my intellect, to treat any human beings like my 'chattels'--I shall pay for that mistake one day or another, I am convinced--and I very much fear that you would soon discover what one fault of mine is, if you were to hear anyone assert such a right in my presence.

Well, I shall see you to-morrow--had I better come a little later, I wonder?--half-past three, for instance, staying, as last time, till ... ah, it is ill policy to count my treasure aloud! Or shall I come at the usual time to-morrow? If I do _not_ hear, at the usual time!--because, I think you would--am sure you would have considered and suggested it, were it necessary.

Bless you, dearest--ever your own.

I said nothing about that Mr. Russell and his proposition--by all means, yes--let him do more good with that noble, pathetic 'lay'--and do not mind the 'burthen,' if he is peremptory--so that he duly specify '_by the singer_'--with _that_ precaution nothing but good can come of his using it.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Thursday. [Post-mark, March 6, 1846.]

Ever dearest I lose no time in writing, you see, so as to be written to at the soonest--and there is another reason which makes me hasten to write ... it is not all mercantile calculation. I want you to understand me.

Now listen! I seem to understand myself: it seems to me that every word I ever said to you on one subject, is plainly referable to a class of feelings of which you could not complain ... could not. But this is _my_ impression; and yours is different:--you do not understand, you do not see by my light, and perhaps it is natural that you should not, as we stand on different steps of the argument. Still I, who said what I did, _for you_, and from an absorbing consideration of what was best _for you_, cannot consent, even out of anxiety for your futurity, to torment you now, to vex you by a form of speech which you persist in translating into a want of trust in you ... (_I_, want trust in you!!) into a need of more evidence about you from others ... (_could_ you say so?) and even into an indisposition on my part to fulfil my engagement--no, dearest dearest, it is not right of you. And therefore, as you have these thoughts reasonably or unreasonably, I shall punish you for them at once, and 'chain' you ... (as you wish to be chained), chain you, rivet you--do you feel how the little fine chain twists round and round you? do you hear the stroke of the riveting? and you may _feel that_ too. Now, it is done--now, you are chained--_Bia_ has finished the work--I, _Ba_! (observe the anagram!) and not a word do you say, of Prometheus, though you have the conscience of it all, I dare say. Well! you must be pleased, ... as it was 'the weight of too much liberty' which offended you: and now you believe, perhaps, that I trust you, love you, and look to you over the heads of the whole living world, without any one head needing to stoop; you _must_, if you please, because you belong to me now and shall believe as I choose. There's a ukase for you! Cry out ... repent ... and I will loose the links, and let you go again--_shall_ it be '_My dear Miss Barrett_?'

Seriously, you shall not think of me such things as you half said, if not whole said, to-day. If all men were to speak evil of you, my heart would speak of you the more good--_that_ would be the one result with _me_. Do I not know you, soul to soul? should I believe that any of them could know you as I know you? Then for the rest, I am not afraid of 'toads' now, not being a child any longer. I am not inclined to mind, if _you_ do not mind, what may be said about us by the benevolent world, nor will other reasons of a graver kind affect me otherwise than by the necessary pain. Therefore the whole rests with you--unless illness should intervene--and you will be kind and good (will you not?) and not think hard thoughts of me ever again--no. It wasn't the sense of being less than you had a right to pretend to, which made me speak what you disliked--for it is _I_ who am 'unworthy,' and not another--not certainly that other!

I meant to write more to-night of subjects farther off us, but my sisters have come up-stairs and I must close my letter quickly. Beloved, take care of your head! Ah, do not write poems, nor read, nor neglect the walking, nor take that shower-bath. _Will_ you, instead, try the warm bathing? Surely the experiment is worth making for a little while. Dearest beloved, do it for your own

BA.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Friday Morning. [Post-mark, March 6, 1846.]

I am altogether your own, dearest--the words were only words and the playful feelings were play--while the _fact_ has always been so irresistibly obvious as to make them _break_ on and off it, fantastically like water turning to spray and spurts of foam on a great solid rock. _Now_ you call the rock, a rock, but you must have known what chance you had of pushing it down when you sent all those light fancies and free-leaves, and refusals-to-hold-responsible, to do what they could. It _is_ a rock; and may be quite barren of good to you,--not large enough to build houses on, not small enough to make a mantelpiece of, much less a pedestal for a statue, but it is real rock, that is all.

It is always _I_ who 'torment' _you_--instead of taking the present and blessing you, and leaving the future to its own cares. I certainly am not apt to look curiously into what next week is to bring, much less next month or six months, but you, the having you, my own, dearest beloved, _that_ is as different in kind as in degree from any other happiness or semblance of it that even seemed possible of realization. Then, now, the health is all to stay, or retard us--oh, be well, my Ba!

Let me speak of that letter--I am ashamed at having mentioned those circumstances, and should not have done so, but for their insignificance--for I knew that if you ever _did_ hear of them, all any body _would_ say would not amount to enough to be repeated to me and so get explained at once. Now that the purpose is gained, it seems little worth gaining. You bade me not send the letter: I will not.

As for 'what people say'--ah--Here lies a book, Bartoli's 'Simboli' and this morning I dipped into his Chapter XIX. His 'Symbol' is 'Socrate fatto ritrar su' Boccali' and the theme of his dissertating, 'L'indegnità del mettere in disprezzo i più degni filosofi dell'antichità.' He sets out by enlarging on the horror of it--then describes the character of Socrates, then tells the story of the representation of the 'Clouds,'and thus gets to his 'symbol'--'le pazzie fatte spacciare a Socrate in quella commedia ... il misero in tanto scherno e derisione del pubblico, che perfino i vasai dipingevano il suo ritratto sopra gli orci, i fiaschi, i boccali, e ogni vasellamento da più vile servigio. Così quel sommo filosofo ... fu condotto a far di se par le case d'Atene una continua commedia, con solamente vederlo comparir così scontraffatto e ridicolo, come i vasai sel formavano d'invenzione'--

There you have what a very clever man can say in choice Tuscan on a passage in Ælian which he takes care not to quote nor allude to, but which is the sole authority for the fact. Ælian, speaking of Socrates' magnanimity, says that on the first representation, a good many foreigners being present who were at a loss to know 'who could be this Socrates'--the sage himself stood up that he might be pointed out to them by the auditory at large ... 'which' says Ælian--'was no difficulty for them, to whom his features were most familiar,--_the very potters being in the habit of decorating their vessels with his likeness_'--no doubt out of a pleasant and affectionate admiration. Yet see how 'people' can turn this out of its sense,--'say' their say on the simplest, plainest word or deed, and change it to its opposite! 'God's great gift of speech abused' indeed!

But what shall we hear of it _there_, my Siren?

On Monday--is it not? _Who_ was it looked into the room just at our leave-taking?

Bless you, my ever dearest,--remember to walk, to go down-stairs--and be sure that I will endeavour to get well for my part. To-day I am very well--with this letter!

Your own.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Friday Evening. [Post-mark, March 7, 1846.]

Always _you_, is it, who torments me? always _you_? Well! I agree to bear the torments as Socrates his persecution by the potters:--and by the way he liked those potters, as Plato shows, and was fain to go to them for his illustrations ... as I to you for all my light. Also, while we are on the subject, I will tell you another fault of your Bartoli ... his 'choice Tuscan' filled one of my pages, in the place of my English better than Tuscan.

For the letter you mentioned, I meant to have said in mine yesterday, that I was grateful to you for telling me of it--_that_ was one of the prodigalities of your goodness to me ... not thrown away, in one sense, however superfluous. Do you ever think how I must feel when you overcome me with all this generous tenderness, only beloved! I cannot say it.

Because it is colder to-day I have not been down-stairs but let to-morrow be warm enough--_facilis descensus_. There's something infernal to me really, in the going down, and now too that our cousin is here! Think of his beginning to attack Henrietta the other day.... '_So_ Mr. C. has retired and left the field to Surtees Cook. Oh ... you needn't deny ... it's the news of all the world except your father. And as to _him_, I don't blame you--he never will consent to the marriage of son or daughter. Only you should consider, you know, because he won't leave you a shilling, &c. &c....' You hear the sort of man. And then in a minute after ... 'And what is this about Ba?' 'About Ba' said my sisters, 'why who has been persuading you of such nonsense?' 'Oh, my authority is very good,--perfectly unnecessary for you to tell any stories, Arabel,--a literary friendship, is it?' ... and so on ... after that fashion! This comes from my brothers of course, but we need not be afraid of its passing _beyond_, I think, though I was a good deal vexed when I heard first of it last night and have been in cousinly anxiety ever since to get our Orestes safe away from those Furies his creditors, into Brittany again. He is an intimate friend of my brothers besides the relationship, and they talk to him as to each other, only they oughtn't to have talked _that_, and without knowledge too.

I forgot to tell you that Mr. Kenyon was in an immoderate joy the day I saw him last, about Mr. Poe's 'Raven' as seen in the _Athenæum_ extracts, and came to ask what I knew of the poet and his poetry, and took away the book. It's the rhythm which has taken him with 'glamour' I fancy. Now you will stay on Monday till the last moment, and go to him for dinner at six.

Who 'looked in at the door?' Nobody. But Arabel a little way opened it, and hearing your voice, went back. There was no harm--_is_ no fear of harm. Nobody in the house would find his or her pleasure in running the risk of giving me pain. I mean my brothers and sisters would not.

Are you trying the music to charm the brain to stillness? Tell me. And keep from that 'Soul's Tragedy' which did so much harm--oh, that I had bound you by some Stygian oath not to touch it.

So my rock ... may the birds drop into your crevices the seeds of all the flowers of the world--only it is not for _those_, that I cling to you as the single rock in the salt sea.

Ever I am

Your own.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Saturday Morning. [Post-mark, March 7, 1846.]

You call me 'kind'; and by this time I have no heart to call you such names--I told you, did I not once? that 'Ba' had got to convey infinitely more of you to my sense than 'dearest,' 'sweetest,' all or any epithets that break down with their load of honey like bees--to say you are 'kind,' you that so entirely and unintermittingly bless me,--it will never do now, 'Ba.' All the same, one way there is to make even 'Ba' dearer,--'_my_ Ba,' I say to myself!

About my _fears_--whether of opening doors or entering people--one thing is observable and prevents the possibility of any misconception--I desire, have been in the habit of desiring, to _increase_ them, far from diminishing--they relate, of course, entirely to _you_--and only through _you_ affect me the least in the world. Put your well-being out of the question, so far as I can understand it to be involved,--and the pleasure and pride I should immediately choose would be that the whole world knew our position. What pleasure, what pride! But I endeavour to remember on all occasions--and perhaps succeed in too few--that it is very easy for me to go away and leave you who cannot go. I only allude to this because some people are 'naturally nervous' and all that--and I am quite of another kind.

Last evening I went out--having been kept at home in the afternoon to see somebody ... went walking for hours. I am quite well to-day and, now your letter comes, my Ba, most happy. And, as the sun shines, you are perhaps making the perilous descent now, while I write--oh, to meet you on the stairs! And I shall really see you on Monday, dearest? So soon, it ought to feel, considering the dreary weeks that now get to go between our days! For music, I made myself melancholy just now with some 'Concertos for the Harpsichord by Mr. Handel'--brought home by my father the day before yesterday;--what were light, modern things once! Now I read not very long ago a French memoir of 'Claude le Jeune' called in his time the Prince of Musicians,--no, '_Phoenix_'--the unapproachable wonder to all time--that is, twenty years after his death about--and to this pamphlet was prefixed as motto this startling axiom--'In Music, the Beau Ideal changes every thirty years'--well, is not that _true_? The _Idea_, mind, changes--the general standard ... so that it is no answer that a single air, such as many one knows, may strike as freshly as ever--they were _not_ according to the Ideal of their own time--just now, they drop into the ready ear,--next hundred years, who will be the Rossini? who is no longer the Rossini even I remember--his early overtures are as purely Rococo as Cimarosa's or more. The sounds remain, keep their character perhaps--the scale's proportioned notes affect the same, that is,--the major third, or minor seventh--but the arrangement of these, the sequence the law--for them, if it _should_ change every thirty years! To Corelli nothing seemed so conclusive in Heaven or earth as this

I don't believe there is one of his sonatas wherein that formula does not do duty. In these things of Handel that seems replaced by

--that was the only true consummation! Then,--to go over the hundred years,--came Rossini's unanswerable coda:

which serves as base to the infinity of songs, gone, gone--_so_ gone by! From all of which Ba draws _this_ 'conclusion' that these may be worse things than Bartoli's Tuscan to cover a page with!--yet, yet the pity of it! Le Jeune, the Phoenix, and Rossini who directed his letters to his mother as 'mother of the famous composer'--and Henry Lawes, and Dowland's Lute, ah me!

Well, my conclusion is the best, the everlasting, here and I trust elsewhere--I am your own, my Ba, ever your

R.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Tuesday Morning. [Post-mark, March 10, 1846.]

Now I shall know what to believe when you talk of very bad and very indifferent doings of yours. Dearest, I read your 'Soul's Tragedy' last night and was quite possessed with it, and fell finally into a mute wonder how you could for a moment doubt about publishing it. It is very vivid, I think, and vital, and impressed me more than the first act of 'Luria' did, though I do not mean to compare such dissimilar things, and for pure nobleness 'Luria' is unapproachable--will prove so, it seems to me. But this 'Tragedy' shows more heat from the first, and then, the words beat down more closely ... well! I am struck by it all as you see. If you keep it up to this passion, if you justify this high key-note, it is a great work, and worthy of a place next 'Luria.' Also do observe how excellently balanced the two will be, and how the tongue of this next silver Bell will swing from side to side. And _you_ to frighten me about it. Yes, and the worst is (because it was stupid in me) the worst is that I half believed you and took the manuscript to be something inferior--for _you_--and the adviseableness of its publication, a doubtful case. And yet, after all, the really worst is, that you should prove yourself such an adept at deceiving! For can it be possible that the same

'Robert Browning'

who (I heard the other day) said once that he could 'wait three hundred years,' should not feel the life of centuries in this work too--can it be? Why all the pulses of the life of it are beating in even _my_ ears!

Tell me, beloved, how you are--I shall hear it to-night--shall I not? To think of your being unwell, and forced to go here and go there to visit people to whom your being unwell falls in at best among the secondary evils!--makes me discontented--which is one shade more to the uneasiness I feel. Will you take care, and not give away your life to these people? Because I have a better claim than they ... and shall put it in, if provoked ... _shall_. Then you will not use the shower-bath again--you promise? I dare say Mr. Kenyon observed yesterday how unwell you were looking--tell me if he didn't! Now do not work, dearest! Do not think of Chiappino, leave him behind ... he has a good strong life of his own, and can wait for you. Oh--but let me remember to say of him, that he and the other personages appear to me to articulate with perfect distinctness and clearness ... you need not be afraid of having been obscure in this first part. It is all as lucid as noon.

Shall I go down-stairs to-day? 'No' say the privy-councillors, 'because it is cold,' but I _shall_ go peradventure, because the sun brightens and brightens, and the wind has gone round to the west.

George had come home yesterday before you left me, but the stars were favourable to us and kept him out of this room. Now he is at Worcester--went this morning, on those never ending 'rounds,' poor fellow, which weary him I am sure.

And why should music and the philosophy of it make you 'melancholy,' ever dearest, more than the other arts, which each has the seal of the age, modifying itself after a fashion and _to_ one? Because it changes more, perhaps. Yet all the Arts are mediators between the soul and the Infinite, ... shifting always like a mist, between the Breath on this side, and the Light on that side ... shifted and coloured; mediators, messengers, projected from the Soul, to go and feel, for Her, _out there_!

You don't call me 'kind' I confess--but then you call me 'too kind' which is nearly as bad, you must allow on your part. Only you were not in earnest when you said _that_, as it appeared afterward. _Were_ you, yesterday, in pretending to think that I owed you nothing ... _I_?

May God bless you. He knows that to give myself to you, is not to pay you. Such debts are not so paid.

Yet I am your

BA.

_People's Journal_ for March 7th.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Tuesday Morning. [Post-mark, March 10, 1846.]

Dear, dear Ba, if you were here I should not much _speak_ to you, not at first--nor, indeed, at last,--but as it is, sitting alone, only words can be spoken, or (worse) written, and, oh how different to look into the eyes and imagine what _might_ be said, what ought to be said, though it never can be--and to sit and say and write, and only imagine who looks above me, looks down, understanding and pardoning all! My love, my Ba, the fault you found once with some expressions of mine about the amount of imperishable pleasures already hoarded in my mind, the indestructible memories of you; that fault, which I refused to acquiesce under the imputation of, at first, you remember--well, _what_ a fault it was, by this better light! If all stopped here and now; horrible! complete oblivion were the thing to be prayed for, rather! As it is, _now_, I must go on, must live the life out, and die yours. And you are doing your utmost to advance the event of events,--the exercise, and consequently (is it not?) necessarily improved sleep, and the projects for the fine days, the walking ... a pure bliss to think of! Well, now--I think I shall show seamanship of a sort, and 'try another tack'--do not be over bold, my sweetest; the cold _is_ considerable,--taken into account the previous mildness. One ill-advised (I, the _adviser_, I should remember!) too early, or too late descent to the drawing-room, and all might be ruined,--thrown back so far ... seeing that our flight is to be prayed for 'not in the winter'--and one would be called on to wait, wait--in this world where nothing waits, rests, as can be counted on. Now think of this, too, dearest, and never mind the slowness, for the sureness' sake! How perfectly happy I am as you stand by me, as yesterday you stood, as you seem to stand now!

I will write to-morrow more: I came home last night with a head rather worse; which in the event was the better, for I took a little medicine and all is very much improved to-day. I shall go out presently, and return very early and take as much care as is proper--for I thought of Ba, and the sublimities of Duty, and that gave myself airs of importance, in short, as I looked at my mother's inevitable arrow-root this morning. So now I am well; so now, is dearest Ba well? I shall hear to-night ... which will have its due effect, that circumstance, in quickening my retreat from Forster's Rooms. All was very pleasant last evening--and your letter &c. went _à qui de droit_, and Mr. W. _Junior_ had to smile good-naturedly when Mr. Burges began laying down this general law, that the sons of all men of genius were poor creatures--and Chorley and I exchanged glances after the fashion of two Augurs meeting at some street-corner in Cicero's time, as he says. And Mr. Kenyon was kind, kinder, kindest, as ever, 'and thus ends a wooing'!--no, a dinner--my wooing ends never, never; and so prepare to be asked to give, and give, and give till all is given in Heaven! And all I give _you_ is just my heart's blessing; God bless you, my dearest, dearest Ba!

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Tuesday Evening. [Post-mark, March 11, 1846.]

You find my letter I trust, for it was written this morning in time; and if these two lines should not be flattery ... oh, rank flattery! ... why happy letter is it, to help to bring you home ten minutes earlier, when you never ought to have left home--no, indeed! I knew how it would be yesterday, and how you would be worse and not better. You are not fit to go out, dear dearest, to sit in the glare of lights and talk and listen, and have the knives and forks to rattle all the while and remind you of the chains of necessity. Oh--should I bear it, do you think? I was thinking, when you went away--_after_ you had quite gone. You would laugh to see me at my dinner--Flush and me--Flush placing in me such an heroic confidence, that, after he has cast one discriminating glance on the plate, and, in the case of 'chicken,' wagged his tail with an emphasis, ... he goes off to the sofa, shuts his eyes and allows a full quarter of an hour to pass before he returns to take his share. Did you ever hear of a dog before who did not persecute one with beseeching eyes at mealtimes? And remember, this is not the effect of _discipline_. Also if another than myself happens to take coffee or break bread in the room here, he teazes straightway with eyes and paws, ... teazes like a common dog and is put out of the door before he can be quieted by scolding. But with _me_ he is sublime! Moreover he has been a very useful dog in his time (in the point of capacity), causing to disappear supererogatory dinners and impossible breakfasts which, to do him justice, is a feat accomplished without an objection on his side, always.

So, when you write me such a letter, I write back to you about Flush. Dearest beloved, but I have read the letter and felt it in my heart, through and through! and it is as wise to talk of Flush foolishly, as to fancy that I _could say how_ it is felt ... this letter! Only when you spoke last of breaking off with such and such recollections, it was the melancholy of the breaking off which I protested against, was it not? and _not_ the insufficiency of the recollections. There might have been something besides in jest. Ah, but _you_ remember, if you please, that _I_ was the first to wish (wishing for my own part, if I could wish exclusively) to break off in the middle the silken thread, and you told me, not--you forbade me--do you remember? For, as happiness goes, the recollections were enough, ... _are_ enough for _me_! I mean that I should acknowledge them to be full compensation for the bitter gift of life, _such as it was_, to me! if that subject-matter were broken off here! 'Bona verba' let me speak nevertheless. You mean, you say, to run all risks with me, and I don't mean to draw back from my particular risk of ... what am I to do to you hereafter to make you vexed with me? What is there in marriage to make all these people on every side of us, (who all began, I suppose, by talking of love,) look askance at one another from under the silken mask ... and virtually hate one another through the tyranny of the stronger and the hypocrisy of the weaker party. It never could be so with _us_--_I know that_. But you grow awful to me sometimes with the very excess of your goodness and tenderness, and still, I think to myself, if you do not keep lifting me up quite off the ground by the strong faculty of love in you, I shall not help falling short of the hope you have placed in me--it must be 'supernatural' of you, to the end! or I fall short and disappoint you. Consider this, beloved. Now if I could put my soul out of my body, just to stand up before you and make it clear.

I did go to the drawing-room to-day ... would ... should ... did. The sun came out, the wind changed ... where was the obstacle? I spent a quarter of an hour in a fearful solitude, listening for knocks at the door, as a ghost-fearer might at midnight, and 'came home' none the worse in any way. Be sure that I shall 'take care' better than you do, and there, is the worst of it all--for _you_ let people make you ill, and do it yourself upon occasion.

You know from my letter how I found you out in the matter of the 'Soul's Tragedy.' Oh! so bad ... so weak, so unworthy of your name! If some other people were half a quarter as much the contrary!

And so, good-night, dear dearest. In spite of my fine speeches about 'recollections,' I should be unhappy enough to please you, with _only those_ ... without you beside! I could not take myself back from being

Your own--

_R.B. to E.B.B._

[Post-mark, March 11, 1846.]

Dear, dear Ba, but indeed I _did_ return home earlier by two or three good hours than the night before--and to find _no_ letter,--none of yours! _That_ was reserved for this morning early, and then a rest came, a silence, over the thoughts of you--and now again, comes this last note! Oh, my love--why--what is it you think to do, or become 'afterward,' that you may fail in and so disappoint me? It is not very unfit that you should thus punish yourself, and that, sinning by your own ambition of growing something beyond my Ba even, you should 'fear' as you say! For, sweet, why wish, why think to alter ever by a line, change by a shade, turn better if that were possible, and so only rise the higher above me, get further from instead of nearer to my heart? What I expect, what I build my future on, am quite, quite prepared to 'risk' everything for,--is that one belief that you _will not alter_, will just remain as you are--meaning by '_you_,' the love in you, the qualities I have _known_ (for you will stop me, if I do not stop myself) what I have evidence of in every letter, in every word, every look. Keeping these, if it be God's will that the body passes,--what is that? Write no new letters, speak no new words, look no new looks,--only tell me, years hence that the present is alive, that what was once, still is--and I am, must needs be, blessed as ever! You speak of my feeling as if it were a pure speculation--as if because I _see somewhat_ in you I make a calculation that there must be more to see somewhere or other--where bdellium is found, the onyx-stone may be looked for in the mystic land of the four rivers! And perhaps ... ah, poor human nature!--perhaps I _do_ think at times on what _may_ be to find! But what is that to you? I _offer_ for the _bdellium_--the other may be found or not found ... what I see glitter on the ground, _that_ will suffice to make me rich as--rich as--

So bless you my own Ba! I would not wait for paper, and you must forgive half-sheets, instead of a whole celestial quire to my love and praise. Are you so well? So adventurous? Thank you from my heart of hearts. And I am quite well to-day (and have received a note from Procter _just_ this _minute_ putting off his dinner on account of the death of his wife's sister's husband abroad). Observe _this_ sheet I take as I find--I mean, that the tear tells of no improper speech repented of--what English, what sense, what a soul's tragedy! but then, what real, realest love and more than love for my ever dearest Ba possesses her own--

_E.B.B. to R.B._

[Post-mark, March 12, 1846.]

When my Orpheus writes '[Greek: Peri lithôn]' he makes a great mistake about onyxes--there is more true onyx in this letter of his that I have just read, than he will ever find in the desert land he goes to. And for what 'glitters on the ground,' it reminds me of the yellow metal sparks found in the Malvern Hills, and how we used to laugh years ago at one of our geological acquaintances, who looked mole-hills up that mountain-range in the scorn of his eyes, saying ... 'Nothing but mica!!' Is anybody to be rich through 'mica', I wonder? through 'Nothing but mica?' 'As rich as--as rich as' ... _Walter the Pennyless_?

Dearest, best you are nevertheless, and it is a sorry jest which I can break upon your poverty, with that golden heart of yours so apprehended of mine! Why if I am 'ambitious'--is it not because you love me as if I were worthier of your love, and that, _so_, I get frightened of the opening of your eyelids to the _un_worthiness? 'A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep'--_there_, is my 'ambition for afterward.' Oh--you do not understand how with an unspeakable wonder, an astonishment which keeps me from drawing breath, I look to this Dream, and 'see your face as the face of an angel,' and fear for the vanishing, ... because dreams and angels _do_ pass away in this world. But _you_, _I_ understand _you_, and all your goodness past expression, past belief of mine, if I had not known you ... just _you_. If it will satisfy you that I should know you, love you, love you--why then indeed--because I never bowed down to any of the false gods I know the gold from the mica, ... I! 'My own beloved'--you should have my soul to stand on if it could make you stand higher. Yet you shall not call me 'ambitious.'

To-day I went down-stairs again, and wished to know whether you were walking in your proportion--and your letter does call you 'better,' whether you walked enough or not, and it bears the Deptford post-mark. On Saturday I shall see how you are looking. So pale you were last time! I know Mr. Kenyon must have observed it, (dear Mr. Kenyon ... for being 'kinder and kindest') and that one of the 'augurs' marvelled at the other! By the way I forgot yesterday to tell you how Mr. Burges's 'apt remark' did amuse me. And Mr. Kenyon who said much the same words to me last week in relation to this very Wordsworth junior, writhed, I am sure, and wished the ingenious observer with the lost plays of Æschylus--oh, I seem to see Mr. Kenyon's face! He was to have come to tell me how you all behaved at dinner that day, but he keeps away ... you have given him too much to think of perhaps.

I heard from Miss Mitford to-day that Mr. Chorley's hope is at an end in respect to the theatre, and (I must tell you) she praises him warmly for his philosophy and fortitude under the disappointment. How much philosophy does it take,--please to instruct me,--in order to the decent bearing of such disasters? Can I fancy one, shorter than you by a whole head of the soul, condescending to '_bear_' such things? No, indeed.

Be good and kind, and do not work at the 'Tragedy' ... do not.

So you and I have written out all the paper in London! At least, I send and send in vain to have more envelopes 'after my kind,' and the last answer is, that a 'fresh supply will arrive in eight days from Paris, and that in the meanwhile they are quite _out_ in the article.' An awful sign of the times, is this famine of envelopes ... not to speak of the scarcity of little sheets:--and the augurs look to it all of course.

For _my_ part I think more of Chiappino--Chiappino holds me fast.

But I must let _you_ go--it is too late. This dearest letter, which you sent me! I thank you for it with ever so much dumbness. May God bless you and keep you, and make you happy for me.

Your BA.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

[Post-mark, March 12, 1846.]

How I get to understand this much of Law--that prior possession is nine points of it! Just because your infinite adroitness got first hold of the point of view whence our connection looks like 'a dream' ... I find myself shut out of my very own, unable to say what is oftenest in my thought; whereas the dear, miraculous dream _you_ were, and are, my Ba! Only, _vanish_--_that_ you will never! My own, and for ever!

Yesterday I read the poor, inconceivably inadequate notice in the _People's Journal_. How curiously wrong, too, in the personal guesses! Sad work truly. For my old friend Mrs. Adams--no, I must be silent: the lyrics seem doggerel in its utter purity. And so the people are to be instructed in the new age of gold! I _heard_ two days ago precisely what I told you--that there was a quarrel, &c. which this service was to smooth over, no doubt. Chorley told me, in a hasty word only, that all was over, Mr. Webster would not have anything to do with his play. The said W. is one of the poorest of poor creatures, and as Chorley was certainly forewarned, forearmed I will hope him to have been likewise--still it is very disappointing--he was apparently nearer than most aspirants to the prize,--having the best will of the actresses on whose shoulder the burthen was to lie. I hope they have been quite honest with him--knowing as I do the easy process of transferring all sorts of burthens, in that theatrical world, from responsible to irresponsible members of it, actors to manager, manager to actors, as the case requires. And it is a 'hope deferred' with Chorley; not for the second or third time. I am very glad that he cares no more than you tell me.

Still you go down-stairs, and still return safely, and every step leads us nearer to _my_ 'hope.' How unremittingly you bless me--a visit promises a letter, a letter brings such news, crowns me with such words, and speaks of another visit--and so the golden links extend. Dearest words, dearest letters--as I add each to my heap, I say--I _do_ say--'I was _poor_, it now seems, a minute ago, when I had not _this_!' Bless you, dear, dear Ba. On Saturday I shall be with you, I trust--may God bless you! Ever your own

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Sunday. [Post-mark, March 16, 1846.]

Ever dearest I am going to say one word first of all lest I should forget it afterward, of the two or three words which you said yesterday and so passingly that you probably forget to-day having said them at all. We were speaking of Mr. Chorley and his house, and you said that you did not care for such and such things for yourself, but that for others--now you remember the rest. And I just want to say what it would have been simpler to have said at the time--only not so easy--(I _couldn't_ say it at the time) that you are not if you please to fancy that because I am a woman I have not the pretension to do with as little in any way as you yourself ... no, it is not _that_ I mean to say.... I mean that you are not, if you please, to fancy that, because I am a woman, I look to be cared for in those outside things, or should have the slightest pleasure in any of them. So never wish nor regret in your thoughts to be able or not to be able to care this and this for _me_; for while you are thinking so, our thoughts go different ways, which is wrong. Mr. Fox did me a great deal too much honour in calling me 'a religious hermit'; he was 'curiously' in fault, as you saw. It is not my vocation to sit on a stone in a cave--I was always too fond of lolling upon sofas or in chairs nearly as large,--and this, which I sit in, was given to me when I was a child by my uncle, the uncle I spoke of to you once, and has been lolled in nearly ever since ... when I was well enough. Well--_that_ is a sort of luxury, of course--but it is more idle than expensive, as a habit, and I do believe that it is the 'head and foot of my offending' in that matter. Yes--'confiteor tibi' besides, that I do hate white dimity curtains, which is highly improper for a religious hermit of course, but excusable in _me_ who would accept brown serge as a substitute with ever so much indifference. It is the white light which comes in the dimity which is so hateful to me. To 'go mad in white dimity' seems perfectly natural, and consequential even. Set aside these foibles, and one thing is as good as another with me, and the more simplicity in the way of living, the better. If I saw Mr. Chorley's satin sofas and gilded ceilings I should call them very pretty I dare say, but never covet the possession of the like--it would never enter my mind to do so. Then Papa has not kept a carriage since I have been grown up (they grumble about it here in the house, but when people have once had great reverses they get nervous about spending money) so I shall not miss the Clarence and greys ... and I do entreat you _not_ to put those two ideas together again of _me_ and the finery which has nothing to do with me. I have talked a great deal too much of all this, you will think, but I want you, once for all, to apply it broadly to the whole of the future both in the general view and the details, so that we need not return to the subject. Judge for me as for yourself--_what is good for you is good for me_. Otherwise I shall be humiliated, you know; just as far as I know your thoughts.

Mr. Kenyon has been here to-day--and I have been down-stairs--two great events! He was in brilliant spirits and sate talking ever so long, and named you as he always does. Something he asked, and then said suddenly ... 'But I don't see why I should ask _you_, when I ought to know him better than you can.' On which I was wise enough to change colour, as I felt, to the roots of my hair. There is the effect of a bad conscience! and it has happened to me before, with Mr. Kenyon, three times--once particularly, when I could have cried with vexation (to complete the effects!), he looked at me with such infinite surprise in a dead pause of any speaking. _That_ was in the summer; and all to be said for it now, is, that it couldn't be helped: couldn't!

Mr. Kenyon asked of 'Saul.' (By the way, you never answered about the blue lilies.) He asked of 'Saul' and whether it would be finished in the new number. He hangs on the music of your David. Did you read in the _Athenæum_ how Jules Janin--no, how the critic on Jules Janin (was it the critic? was it Jules Janin? the glorious confusion is gaining on me I think) has magnificently confounded places and persons in Robert Southey's urn by the Adriatic and devoted friendship for Lord Byron? And immediately the English observer of the phenomenon, after moralizing a little on the crass ignorance of Frenchmen in respect to our literature, goes on to write like an ignoramus himself, on Mme. Charles Reybaud, encouraging that pure budding novelist, who is in fact a hack writer of romances third and fourth rate, of questionable purity enough, too. It does certainly appear wonderful that we should not sufficiently stand abreast here in Europe, to justify and necessitate the establishment of an European review--journal rather--(the 'Foreign Review,' so called, touching only the summits of the hills) a journal which might be on a level with the intelligent readers of all the countries of Europe, and take all the rising reputations of each, with the national light on them as they rise, into observation and judgment. If nobody can do this, it is a pity I think to do so much less--both in France and England--to snatch up a French book from over the Channel as ever and anon they do in the _Athenæum_, and say something prodigiously absurd of it, till people cry out 'oh oh' as in the House of Commons.

Oh--oh--and how wise I am to-day, as if I were a critic myself! Yesterday I was foolish instead--for I couldn't get out of my head all the evening how you said that you would come 'to see a candle held up at the window.' Well! but I do not mean to love you any more just now--so I tell you plainly. Certainly I will not. I love you already too much perhaps. I feel like the turning Dervishes turning in the sun when you say such words to me--and I _never shall_ love you any 'less,' because it is too much to be made less of.

And you write to-morrow? and will tell me how you are? honestly will tell me? May God bless you, most dear!

I am yours--'Tota tua est'

BA.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Sunday. [Post-mark, March 16, 1846.]

How will the love my heart is full of for you, let me be silent? Insufficient speech is better than no speech, in one regard--the speaker had _tried_ words, and if they fail, hereafter he needs not reflect that he did not even try--so with me now, that loving you, Ba, with all my heart and soul, all my senses being lost in one wide wondering gratitude and veneration, I press close to you to say so, in this imperfect way, my dear dearest beloved! Why do you not help me, rather than take my words, my proper word, from me and call them yours, when yours they are not? You said lately love of you 'made you humble'--just as if to hinder _me_ from saying that earnest truth!--entirely true it is, as I feel ever more convincingly. You do not choose to understand it should be so, nor do I much care, for the one thing you must believe, must resolve to believe in its length and breadth, is that I do love you and live only in the love of you.

I will rest on the confidence that you do so believe! You _know_ by this that it is no shadowy image of you and _not_ you, which having attached myself to in the first instance, I afterward compelled my fancy to see reproduced, so to speak, with tolerable exactness to the original idea, in you, the dearest real _you_ I am blessed with--you _know_ what the eyes are to me, and the lips and the hair. And I, for my part, know _now_, while fresh from seeing you, certainly _know_, whatever I may have said a short time since, that _you_ will go on to the end, that the arm round me will not let me go,--over such a blind abyss--I refuse to think, to fancy, _towards_ what it would be to loose you now! So I give my life, my soul into your hand--the giving is a mere form too, it is yours, ever yours from the first--but ever as I see you, sit with you, and come away to think over it all, I find more that seems mine to give; you give me more life and it goes back to you.

I shall hear from you to-morrow--then, I will go out early and get done with some calls, in the joy and consciousness of what waits me, and when I return I will write a few words. Are these letters, these merest attempts at getting to talk with you through the distance--yet always with the consolation of feeling that you will know all, interpret all and forgive it and put it right--can such things be cared for, expected, as you say? Then, Ba, my life _must_ be better ... with the closeness to help, and the 'finding out the way' for which love was always noted. If you begin making in fancy a lover to your mind, I am lost at once--but the one quality of _affection_ for you, which would sooner or later have to be placed on his list of component graces; _that_ I will dare start supply--the entire love you could dream of _is_ here. You think you see some of the other adornments, and only too many; and you will see plainer one day, but with that I do not concern myself--you shall admire the true heroes--but me you shall love for the love's sake. Let me kiss you, you, my dearest, dearest--God bless you ever--

_R.B. to E.B.B._

[Post-mark, March 16, 1846.]

Indeed I would, dearest Ba, go with entire gladness and pride to see a light that came from your room--why should that surprise you? Well, you will _know_ one day.

We understand each other too about the sofas and gilding--oh, I know you, my own sweetest! For me, if I had set those matters to heart, I should have turned into the obvious way of getting them--not _out_ of it, as I did resolutely from the beginning. All I meant was, to express a very natural feeling--if one could give you diamonds for flowers, and if you liked diamonds,--then, indeed! As it is, wherever we are found shall be, if you please, 'For the love's sake found therein--sweetest _house_ was ever seen!'

Mr. Kenyon must be merciful. Lilies are of all colours in Palestine--one sort is particularized as _white_ with a dark blue spot and streak--the water lily, lotos, which I think I meant, is _blue_ altogether.

I have walked this morning to town and back--I feel much better, 'honestly'! The head better--the spirits rising--as how should they not, when _you_ think all will go well in the end, when you write to me that you go down-stairs and are stronger--and when the rest is written?

Not more now, dearest, for time is pressing, but you will answer this,--the love that is not here,--not the idle words, and I will reply to-morrow. Thursday is so far away yet!

Bless you, my very own, only dearest!

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Monday Evening. [Post-mark, March 17, 1846.]

Dearest, you are dearest always! Talk of Sirens, ... there must be some masculine ones 'rari nantes,' I fancy, (though we may not find them in unquestionable authorities like your Ælian!) to justify this voice I hear. Ah, how you speak, with that pretension, too, to dumbness! What should people be made of, in order to bear such words, do you think? Will all the wax from all the altar-candles in the Sistine Chapel, keep the piercing danger from their ears? Being tied up a good deal tighter than Ulysses did not save _me_. Dearest dearest: I laugh, you see, as usual, not to cry! But deep down, deeper than the Sirens go, deep underneath the tides, _there_, I bless and love you with the voice that makes no sound.

Other human creatures (how often I do think it to myself!) have their good things scattered over their lives, sown here and sown there, down the slopes, and by the waysides. But with me ... I have mine all poured down on one spot in the midst of the sands!--if you knew what I feel at moments, and at half-hours, when I give myself up to the feeling freely and take no thought of red eyes. A woman once was killed with gifts, crushed with the weight of golden bracelets thrown at her: and, knowing myself, I have wondered more than a little, how it was that I could _bear_ this strange and unused gladness, without sinking as the emotion rose. Only I was incredulous at first, and the day broke slowly ... and the gifts fell like the rain ... softly; and God gives strength, by His providence, for sustaining blessings as well as stripes. Dearest--

For the rest I understand you perfectly--perfectly. It was simply to your _thoughts_, that I replied ... and that you need not say to yourself any more, as you did once to me when you brought me flowers, that you wished they were diamonds. It was simply to prevent the accident of such a _thought_, that I spoke out mine. You would not wish accidentally that you had a double-barrelled gun to give me, or a cardinal's hat, or a snuff box, and I meant to say that you _might as well_--as diamonds and satin sofas à la Chorley. Thoughts are something, and _your_ thoughts are something more. To be sure they are!

You are better you say, which makes me happy of course. And you will not make the 'better' worse again by doing wrong things--_that_ is my petition. It was the excess of goodness to write those two letters for me in one day, and I thank you, thank you. Beloved, when you write, _let_ it be, if you choose, ever so few lines. Do not suffer me (for my own sake) to tire you, because two lines or three bring _you_ to me ... remember ... just as a longer letter would.

But where, pray, did I say, and when, that 'everything would end well?' Was _that_ in the dream, when we two met on the stairs? I did not really say so I think. And 'well' is how you understand it. If you jump out of the window you succeed in getting to the ground, somehow, dead or alive ... but whether _that_ means 'ending well,' depends on your way of considering matters. I am seriously of opinion nevertheless, that if 'the arm,' you talk of, _drops_, it will not be for weariness nor even for weakness, but because it is cut off at the shoulder. _I_ will not fail to you,--may God so deal with me, so bless me, so leave me, as I live only for you and _shall_. Do you doubt _that_, my only beloved! Ah, you know well--_too well_, people would say ... but I do not think it 'too well' myself, ... knowing _you_.

Your

BA.

Here is a gossip which Mr. Kenyon brought me on Sunday--disbelieving it himself, he asseverated, though Lady Chantrey said it 'with authority,'--that Mr. Harness had offered his hand heart and ecclesiastical dignities to Miss Burdett Coutts. It is Lady Chantrey's and Mr. Kenyon's _secret_, remember.

And ... will you tell me? How can a man spend four or five successive months on the sea, most cheaply--at the least pecuniary expense, I mean? Because Miss Mitford's friend Mr. Buckingham is ordered by his medical adviser to complete his cure by these means; and he is not rich. Could he go with sufficient comfort by a merchant's vessel to the Mediterranean ... and might he drift about among the Greek islands?

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Tuesday.

'Out of window' would be well, as I see the leap, if it ended (_so far as I am concerned_) in the worst way imaginable--I would I 'run the risk' (Ba's other word) rationally, deliberately,--knowing what the ordinary law of chances in this world justifies in such a case; and if the result after all _was_ unfortunate, it would be far easier to undergo the extremest penalty with so little to reproach myself for,--than to put aside the adventure,--waive the wondrous probability of such best fortune, in a fear of the barest possibility of an adverse event, and so go to my grave, Walter the Penniless, with an eternal recollection that Miss Burdett Coutts once offered to wager sundry millions with me that she could throw double-sixes a dozen times running--which wager I wisely refused to accept because it was not written in the stars that such a sequence might never be. I had rather, rather a thousand-fold lose my paltry stake, and be the one recorded victim to such an unexampled unluckiness that half a dozen mad comets, suns gone wrong, and lunatic moons must have come laboriously into conjunction for my special sake to bring it to pass, which were no slight honour, properly considered!--And this is _my_ way of laughing, dearest Ba, when the excess of belief in you, and happiness with you, runs over and froths if it don't sparkle--underneath is a deep, a sea not to be moved. But chance, chance! there is _no_ chance here! I _have_ gained enough for my life, I can only put in peril the gaining more than enough. You shall change altogether my dear, dearest love, and I will be happy to the last minute on what I can remember of this past year--I _could_ do that. _Now_, jump with me out, Ba! If you feared for yourself--all would be different, sadly different--But saying what you do say, promising 'the strength of arm'--do not wonder that I call it an assurance of all being 'well'! All is _best_, as you promise--dear, darling Ba!--and I say, in my degree, with all the energy of my nature, _as you say_, promise as you promise--only meaning a worship of you that is solely fit for me, fit by position--are not you my 'mistress?' Come, some good out of those old conventions, in which you lost faith after the Bower's disappearance, (it was carried by the singing angels, like the house at Loretto, to the Siren's isle where we shall find it preserved in a beauty 'very rare and absolute')--is it not right you should be my Lady, my Queen? and you are, and ever must be, dear Ba. Because I am suffered to kiss the lips, shall I ever refuse to embrace the feet? and kiss lips, and embrace feet, love you _wholly_, my Ba! May God bless you--

Ever your own,

R.

It would be easy for Mr. Buckingham to find a Merchant-ship bound for some Mediterranean port, after a week or two in harbour, to another and perhaps a third--Naples, Palermo, Syra, Constantinople, and so on. The expense would be very trifling, but the want of comfort _enormous_ for an invalid--the one advantage is the solitariness of the _one_ passenger among all those rough new creatures. _I_ like it much, and soon get deep into their friendship, but another has other ways of viewing matters. No one article provided by the ship in the way of provisions can anybody touch. Mr. B. must lay in his own stock, and the horrors of dirt and men's ministry are portentous, yet by a little arrangement beforehand much might be done. Still, I only know my own powers of endurance, and counsel nobody to gain my experience. On the other hand, were all to do again, I had rather have seen Venice _so_, with the five or six weeks' absolute rest of the mind's eyes, than any other imaginable way,--except Balloon-travelling.

Do you think they meant Landor's 'Count Julian'--the 'subject of his tragedy' sure enough,--and that _he_ was the friend of Southey? So it struck me--

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Tuesday Evening. [Post-mark, March 18, 1846.]

Ah well--we shall see. Only remember that it is not my fault if I throw the double sixes, and if you, on [_some sun-shiny_ day, (a day too late to help yourself) stand face to face with a milkwhite unicorn.][1] Ah--do not be angry. It is ungrateful of me to write so--I put a line through it to prove I have a conscience after all. I know that you love me, and I know it so well that I was reproaching myself severely not long ago, for seeming to love your love more than you. Let me tell you how I proved _that_, or seemed. For ever so long, you remember, I have been talking finely about giving you up for your good and so on. Which was sincere as far as the words went--but oh, the hypocrisy of our souls!--of mine, for instance! 'I would give you up for your good'--_but_ when I pressed upon myself the question whether (if I had the power) I would consent to make you willing to be given up, by throwing away your love into the river, in a ring like Charlemagne's, ... why I found directly that I would throw myself there sooner. I could not do it in fact--I shrank from the test. A very pitiful virtue of generosity, is your Ba's! Still, it is not possible, I think, that she should '_love your love more than you_.' There must be a mistake in the calculation somewhere--a figure dropt. It would be too bad for her!

Your account of your merchantmen, though with Venice in the distance, will scarcely be attractive to a confirmed invalid, I fear--and yet the steamers will be found expensive beyond his means. The sugar-vessels, which I hear most about, give out an insufferable smell and steam--let us talk of it a little on Thursday. On Monday I forgot.

For Landor's 'Julian,' oh no, I cannot fancy it to be probable that those Parisians should know anything of Landor, even by a mistake. Do you not suppose that the play is founded (confounded) on Shelley's poem, as the French use materials ... by distraction, into confusion? The 'urn by the Adriatic' (which all the French know how to turn upside down) fixes the reference to Shelley--does it not?

Not a word of the head--what does _that_ mean, I wonder. I have not been down-stairs to-day--the wind is too cold--but you have walked? ... there was no excuse for you. God bless you, ever dearest. It is my last word till Thursday's first. A fine queen you have, by the way!--a queen Log, whom you had better leave in the bushes! Witness our hand....

BA--REGINA.

[Footnote 1: The words in brackets are struck out.]

_R.B. to E.B.B._

[Post-mark, March 18, 1846.]

Indeed, dearest, you shall not have _last word_ as you think,--all the 'risk' shall not be mine, neither; how can I, in the event, throw ambs-ace (is not that the old word?) and not peril _your_ stakes too, when once we have common stock and are partners? When I see the unicorn and grieve proportionately, do you mean to say you are not going to grieve too, for my sake? And if so--why, _you_ clearly run exactly the same risk,--_must_,--unless you mean to rejoice in my sorrow! So your chance is my chance; my success your success, you say, and my failure, your failure, will you not say? You see, you see, Ba, my own--own! What do you think frightened me in your letter for a second or two? You write 'Let us talk on Thursday ... Monday I forgot'--which I read,--'no, not on Thursday--I had forgotten! It is to be _Monday_ when we meet next'!--whereat

... as a goose In death contracts his talons close,

as Hudibras sings--I clutched the letter convulsively--till relief came.

So till to-morrow--my all-beloved! Bless you. I am rather hazy in the head as Archer Gurney will find in due season--(he comes, I told you)--but all the morning I have been going for once and for ever through the 'Tragedy,' and it is _done_--(done _for_). Perhaps I may bring it to-morrow--if my sister can copy all; I cut out a huge kind of sermon from the middle and reserve it for a better time--still it is very long; so long! So, if I ask, may I have 'Luria' back to morrow? So shall printing begin, and headache end--and 'no more for the present from your loving'

R.B.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Friday. [Post-mark, March 20, 1846.]

I shall be late with my letter this morning because my sisters have been here talking, talking ... and I did not like to say exactly 'Go away that I may write.' Mr. Kenyon shortened our time yesterday too by a whole half-hour or three quarters--the stars are against us. He is coming on Sunday, however, he says, and if so, Monday will be safe and clear--and not a word was said after you went, about you: he was in a good joyous humour, as you saw, and the letter he brought was, oh! so complimentary to me--I will tell you. The writer doesn't see anything 'in Browning and Turner,' she confesses--'_may_ perhaps with time and study,' but for the present sees nothing,--only has wide-open eyes of admiration for E.B.B. ... now isn't it satisfactory to _me_? Do you understand the full satisfaction of just that sort of thing ... to be praised by somebody who sees nothing in Shakespeare?--to be found on the level of somebody so flat? Better the bad-word of the Britannia, ten times over! And best, to take no thought of bad or good words! ... except such as I shall have to-night, perhaps! Shall I?

Will you be pleased to understand in the meanwhile a little about the 'risks' I am supposed to run, and not hold to such a godlike simplicity ('gods and bulls,' dearest!) as you made show of yesterday? If we two went to the gaming-table, and you gave me a purse of gold to play with, should I have a right to talk proudly of 'my stakes?' and would any reasonable person say of both of us playing together as partners, that we ran 'equal risks'? I trow not--and so do _you_ ... when you have not predetermined to be stupid, and mix up the rouge and noir into 'one red' of glorious confusion. What had I to lose on the point of happiness when you knew me first?--and if now I lose (as I certainly may according to your calculation) the happiness you have given me, why still I am your debtor for _the gift_ ... now see! Yet to bring you down into my ashes ... _that_ has been so intolerable a possibility to me from the first. Well, perhaps I run _more_ risk than you, under that one aspect. Certainly I never should forgive myself again if you were unhappy. 'What had _I_ to do,' I should think, 'with touching your life?' And if ever I am to think so, I would rather that I never had known you, seen your face, heard your voice--which is the uttermost sacrifice and abnegation. I could not say or sacrifice any more--not even for _you_! _You_, for _you_ ... is all I can!

Since you left me I have been making up my mind to your having the headache worse than ever, through the agreement with Moxon. I do, do beseech you to spare yourself, and let 'Luria' go as he is, and above all things not to care for my infinite foolishnesses as you see them in those notes. Remember that if you are ill, it is not so easy to say, 'Now I will be well again.' Ever dearest, care for me in yourself--say how you are.... I am not unwell to-day, but feel flagged and weak rather with the cold ... and look at your flowers for courage and an assurance that the summer is within hearing. May God bless you ... blessing _us_, beloved!

Your own

BA.

Mr. Poe has sent me his poems and tales--so now I must write to thank him for his dedication. Just now I have the book. As to Mr. Buckingham, he will go, Constantinople and back, before we talk of him.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Saturday Morning. [Post-mark, March 21, 1846.]

Dearest,--it just strikes me that I _might_ by some chance be kept in town this morning--(having to go to Milnes' breakfast there)--so as not to find the note I venture to expect, in time for an answer by our last post to-night. But I will try--this only is a precaution against the possibility. Dear, dear Ba! I cannot thank you, know not how to thank you for the notes! I adopt every one, of course, not as Ba's notes but as Miss Barrett's, not as Miss Barrett's but as anybody's, everybody's--such incontestable improvements they suggest. When shall I tell you more ... on Monday or Tuesday? _That_ I _must_ know--because you appointed Monday, 'if nothing happened--' and Mr. K. happened--can you let me hear by our early post to-morrow--as on Monday I am to be with Moxon early, you know--and no letters arrive before 11-1/2 or 12. I was not very well yesterday, but to-day am much better--and you,--I say how _I_ am precisely to have a double right to know _all_ about you, dearest, in this snow and cold! How do you bear it? And Mr. K. spoke of '_that_ being your worst day.' Oh, dear dearest Ba, remember how I live in you--on the hopes, with the memory of you. Bless you ever!

R.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

[Post-mark, March 21, 1846.]

I do not understand how my letters limp so instead of flying as they ought with the feathers I give them, and how you did not receive last night, nor even early this morning, what left me at two o'clock yesterday. But I understand _now_ the not hearing from you--you were not well. Not well, not well ... _that_ is always 'happening' at least. And Mr. Moxon, who is to have his first sheet, whether you are well or ill! It is wrong ... yes, very wrong--and if one point of wrongness is touched, we shall not easily get right again--as I think mournfully, feeling confident (call me Cassandra, but I cannot jest about it) feeling certain that it will end (the means being so persisted in) by some serious illness--serious sorrow,--on yours and my part.

As to Monday, Mr. Kenyon said he would come again on Sunday--in which case, Monday will be clear. If he should not come on Sunday, he will or may on Monday,--yet--oh, in every case, perhaps you can come on Monday--there will be no time to let you know of Mr. Kenyon--and _probably_ we shall be safe, and your being in town seems to fix the day. For myself I am well enough, and the wind has changed, which will make me better--this cold weather oppresses and weakens me, but it is close to April and can't last and won't last--it is warmer already. Beware of the notes! They are not Ba's--except for the insolence, nor EBB's--because of the carelessness. If I had known, moreover, that you were going to Moxon's on Monday, they should have gone to the fire rather than provoked you into superfluous work for the short interval. Just so much are they despised of both EBB and Ba.

I am glad I did not hear from you yesterday because you were not well, and you _must never_ write when you are not well. But if you had been quite well, should I have heard?--_I doubt it_. You meant me to hear from you only once, from Thursday to Monday. Is it not the truth now that you hate writing to me?

The _Athenæum_ takes up the 'Tales from Boccaccio' as if they were worth it, and imputes in an underground way the authorship to the members of the 'coterie' so called--do you observe _that_? There is an implication that persons named in the poem wrote the poem themselves. And upon _whom_ does the critic mean to fix the song of 'Constancy' ... the song which is 'not to puzzle anybody' who knows the tunes of the song-writers! The perfection of commonplace it seems to me. It might have been written by the 'poet Bunn.' Don't you think so?

While I write this you are in town, but you will not read it till Sunday unless I am more fortunate than usual. On Monday then! And no word before? No--I shall be sure not to hear to-night. Now do try not to suffer through 'Luria.' Let Mr. Moxon wait a week rather. There is time enough.

Ever your

BA.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Sunday. [Post-mark, March 23, 1846.]

Oh, my Ba--how you shall hear of this to-morrow--that is all: _I_ hate writing? See when presently I _only_ write to you daily, hourly if you let me? Just this _now_--I will be with you to-morrow in any case--I can go away _at once_, if need be, or stay--if you like you can stop me by sending a note for me _to Moxon's before_ 10 o'clock--if anything calls for such a measure.

Now briefly,--I am unwell and entirely irritated with this sad 'Luria'--I thought it a failure at first, I find it infinitely worse than I thought--it is a pure exercise of _cleverness_, even where most successful; clever attempted reproduction of what was conceived by another faculty, and foolishly let pass away. If I go on, even hurry the more to get on, with the printing,--it is to throw out and away from me the irritating obstruction once and forever. I have corrected it, cut it down, and it may stand and pledge me to doing better hereafter. I say, too, in excuse to myself, _unlike_ the woman at her spinning-wheel, 'He thought of his _flax_ on the whole far more than of his singing'--more of his life's sustainment, of dear, dear Ba he hates writing to, than of these wooden figures--no wonder all is as it is?

Here is a pure piece of the old Chorley leaven for you, just as it reappears ever and anon and throws one back on the mistrust all but abandoned! Chorley _knows_ I have not seen that Powell for nearly fifteen months--that I never heard of the book till it reached me in a blank cover--that I never contributed a line or word to it directly or indirectly--and I should think he _also knows_ that all the sham learning, notes &c., all that saves the book from the deepest deep of contempt, was contributed by Heraud (_a regular critic in the 'Athenæum'_), who received his pay for the same: he knows I never spoke in my life to 'Jones or Stephens'--that there is no 'coterie' of which I can, by any extension of the word, form a part--that I am in this case at the mercy of a wretched creature who to get into my favour again (to speak the plain truth) put in the gross, disgusting flattery in the notes--yet Chorley, knowing this, none so well, and what the writer's end is--(to have it supposed I, and the others named--Talfourd, for instance--ARE his friends and helpers)--he condescends to _further_ it by such a notice, written with that observable and characteristic duplicity, that to poor gross stupid Powell it shall look like an admiring 'Oh, fie--_so_ clever but _so_ wicked'!--a kind of _D'Orsay's_ praise--while to the rest of his readers, a few depreciatory epithets--slight sneers convey his real sentiments, he trusts! And this he does, just because Powell buys an article of him once a quarter and would _expect_ notice. I think I hear Chorley--'You know, I _cannot_ praise such a book--it _is_ too bad'--as if, as if--oh, it makes one sicker than having written 'Luria,' there's one comfort! I shall call on Chorley and ask for _his_ account of the matter. Meantime nobody will read his foolish notice without believing as he and Powell desire! Bless you, my own Ba--to-morrow makes amends to R.B.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Tuesday. [Post-mark, March 24, 1846.]

How ungrateful I was to your flowers yesterday, never looking at them nor praising them till they were put away, and yourself gone away--and _that_ was _your_ fault, be it remembered, because you began to tell me of the good news from Moxon's, and, in the joy of it, I missed the flowers ... for the nonce, you know. Afterward they had their due, and all the more that you were not there. My first business when you are out of the room and the house, and the street perhaps, is to arrange the flowers and to gather out of them all the thoughts you leave between the leaves and at the end of the stalks. And shall I tell you what happened, not yesterday, but the Thursday before? no, it was the Friday morning, when I found, or rather Wilson found and held up from my chair, a bunch of dead blue violets. Quite dead they seemed! You had dropped them and I had sate on them, and where we murdered them they had lain, poor things, all the night through. And Wilson thought it the vainest of labours when she saw me set about reviving them, cutting the stalks afresh, and dipping them head and ears into water--but then she did not know how you, and I, and ours, live under a miraculous dispensation, and could only simply be astonished when they took to blowing again as if they never had wanted the dew of the garden, ... yes, and when at last they outlived all the prosperity of the contemporary white violets which flourished in water from the beginning, and were free from the disadvantage of having been sate upon. Now you shall thank me for this letter, it is at once so amusing and instructive. After all, too, it teaches you what the great events of my life are, not that the resuscitation of your violets would not really be a great event to me, even if I led the life of a pirate, between fire and sea, otherwise. But take _you_ away ... out of my life!--and what remains? The only greenness I used to have (before you brought your flowers) was as the grass growing in deserted streets, ... which brings a proof, in every increase, of the extending desolation.

Dearest, I persist in thinking that you ought not to be too disdainful to explain your meaning in the Pomegranates. Surely you might say in a word or two that, your title having been doubted about (to your surprise, you _might_ say!), you refer the doubters to the Jewish priest's robe, and the Rabbinical gloss ... for I suppose it is a gloss on the robe ... do you not think so? Consider that Mr. Kenyon and I may fairly represent the average intelligence of your readers,--and that _he_ was altogether in the clouds as to your meaning ... had not the most distant notion of it,--while I, taking hold of the priest's garment, missed the Rabbins and the distinctive significance, as completely as he did. Then for Vasari, it is not the handbook of the whole world, however it may be Mrs. Jameson's. Now why should you be too proud to teach such persons as only desire to be taught? I persist--I shall teaze you.

This morning my brothers have been saying ... 'Ah you had Mr. Browning with you yesterday, I see by the flowers,' ... just as if they said 'I see queen Mab has been with you.' Then Stormie took the opportunity of swearing to me by all his gods that your name was mentioned lately in the House of Commons--_is_ that true? or untrue? He forgot to tell me at the time, he says,--and you were named with others and in relation to copyright matters. _Is_ it true?

Mr. Hornblower Gill is the author of a Hymn to Passion week, and wrote to me as the 'glorifier of pain!' to remind me that the best glory of a soul is shown in the joy of it, and that all chief poets except Dante have seen, felt, and written it so. Thus and therefore was matured his purpose of writing an 'ode to joy,' as I told you. The man seems to have very good thoughts, ... but he writes like a colder Cowley still ... no impulse, no heat for fusing ... no inspiration, in fact. Though I have scarcely done more than glance at his 'Passion week,' and have little right to give an opinion.

If you have killed Luria as you helped to kill my violets, what shall I say, do you fancy? Well--we shall see! Do not kill yourself, beloved, in any case! The [Greek: iostephanoi Mousai] had better die themselves first! Ah--what am I writing? What nonsense? I mean, in deep earnest, the deepest, that you should take care and exercise, and not be vexed for Luria's sake--Luria will have his triumph presently! May God bless you--prays your own

BA.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Tuesday Afternoon. [Post-mark, March 24, 1846.]

My own dearest, if you _do_--(for I confess to nothing of the kind), but if you _should_ detect an unwillingness to write at certain times, what would that prove,--I mean, what that one need shrink from avowing? If I never had you before me except when writing letters to you--then! Why, we do not even _talk_ much now! witness Mr. Buckingham and his voyage that ought to have been discussed!--Oh, how coldly I should write,--how the bleak-looking paper would seem unpropitious to carry my feeling--if all had to begin and try to find words _this_ way!

Now, this morning I have been out--to town and back--and for all the walking my head aches--and I have the conviction that presently when I resign myself to think of you wholly, with only the pretext,--the make-believe of occupation, in the shape of some book to turn over the leaves of,--I shall see you and soon be well; so soon! You must know, there is a chair (one of the kind called gond_ó_la-chairs by upholsterers--with an emphasized o)--which occupies the precise place, stands just in the same relation to this chair I sit on now, that yours stands in and occupies--to the left of the fire: and, how often, how _always_ I turn in the dusk and _see_ the dearest real Ba with me.

How entirely kind to take that trouble, give those sittings for me! Do you think the kindness has missed its due effect? _No, no_, I am glad,--(_knowing what I_ now _know_,--what you meant _should be_, and did all in your power to prevent) that I have _not_ received the picture, if anything short of an adequate likeness. 'Nil nisi--te!' But I have set my heart on _seeing_ it--will you remember next time, next Saturday?

I will leave off now. To-morrow, dearest, only dearest Ba, I will write a longer letter--the clock stops it this afternoon--it is later than I thought, and our poor crazy post! This morning, hoping against hope, I ran to meet our postman coming meditatively up the lane--with _a_ letter, indeed!--but Ba's will come to-night--and I will be happy, already _am_ happy, expecting it. Bless you, my own love,

Ever your--

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Tuesday Evening. [Post-mark, March 25, 1846.]

Ah; if I '_do_' ... if I '_should_' ... if I _shall_ ... if I _will_ ... if I _must_ ... what can all the 'ifs' prove, but a most hypothetical state of the conscience? And in brief, I beg you to stand convinced of one thing, that whenever the 'certain time' comes for to 'hate writing to me' confessedly, 'avowedly,' (oh what words!) _I shall not like it at all_--not for all the explanations ... and the sights in gondola chairs, which the person seen is none the better for! The [Greek: eidôlon] sits by the fire--the real Ba is cold at heart through wanting her letter. And that's the doctrine to be preached now, ... is it? I 'shrink,' shrink from it. That's your word!--and mine! Dearest, I began by half a jest and end by half-gravity, which is the fault of your doctrine and not of me I think. Yet it is ungrateful to be grave, when practically you are good and just about the letters, and generous too sometimes, and I could not bear the idea of obliging you to write to me, even once ... when.... Now do not fancy that I do not understand. I understand perfectly, on the contrary. Only do _you_ try not to dislike writing when you write, or not to write when you dislike it ... _that_, I ask of you, dear dearest--and forgive me for all this over-writing and teazing and vexing which is foolish and womanish in the bad sense. It is a way of meeting, ... the meeting in letters, ... and next to receiving a letter from you, I like to write one to you ... and, so, revolt from thinking it lawful for you to dislike.... Well! the Goddess of Dulness herself couldn't have written _this_ better, anyway, nor more characteristically.

I will tell you how it is. You have spoilt me just as I have spoilt Flush. Flush looks at me sometimes with reproachful eyes 'a fendre le coeur,' because I refuse to give him my fur cuffs to tear to pieces. And as for myself, I confess to being more than half jealous of the [Greek: eidôlon] in the gondola chair, who isn't the real Ba after all, and yet is set up there to do away with the necessity 'at certain times' of writing to her. Which is worse than Flush. For Flush, though he began by shivering with rage and barking and howling and gnashing his teeth at the brown dog in the glass, has learnt by experience what that image means, ... and now contemplates it, serene in natural philosophy. Most excellent sense, all this is!--and dauntlessly 'delivered!'

Your head aches, dearest. Mr. Moxon will have done his worst, however, presently, and then you will be a little better I do hope and trust--and the proofs, in the meanwhile, will do somewhat less harm than the manuscript. You will take heart again about 'Luria' ... which I agree with you, is more diffuse ... that is, less close, than any of your works, not diffuse in any bad sense, but round, copious, and another proof of that wonderful variety of faculty which is so striking in you, and which signalizes itself both in the thought and in the medium of the thought. You will appreciate 'Luria' in time--or others will do it for you. It is a noble work under every aspect. Dear 'Luria'! Do you remember how you told me of 'Luria' last year, in one of your early letters? Little I thought that ever, ever, I should feel so, while 'Luria' went to be printed! A long trail of thoughts, like the rack in the sky, follows his going. Can it be the same 'Luria,' I think, that 'golden-hearted Luria,' whom you talked of to me, when you complained of keeping 'wild company,' in the old dear letter? And I have learnt since, that '_golden-hearted_' is not a word for him only, or for him most. May God bless you, best and dearest! I am your own to live and to die--

BA.

_Say how you are._ I shall be down-stairs to-morrow if it keeps warm.

Miss Thomson wants me to translate the Hector and Andromache scene from the 'Iliad' for her book; and I am going to try it.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME

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