Chapter XV: Part 15

_Wednesday._--All but the last few lines of all this was written before I saw you yesterday, ever dearest--and since, I have been reading your third act which is perfectly noble and worthy of you both in the conception and expression, and carries the reader on triumphantly ... to speak for one reader. It seems to me too that the language is freer--there is less inversion and more breadth of rhythm. It just strikes me so for the first impression. At any rate the interest grows and grows. You have a secret about Domizia, I guess--which will not be told till the last perhaps. And that poor, noble Luria, who will be equal to the leap ... as it is easy to see. It is full, altogether, of magnanimities;--noble, and nobly put. I will go on with my notes, and those, you shall have at once ... I mean together ... presently. And don't hurry and chafe yourself for the fourth act--now that you are better! To be ill again--think what that would be! Luria will be great now whatever you do--or whatever you do _not_. Will he not?

And never, never for a moment (I quite forgot to tell you) did I fancy that you were talking at _me_ in the temper-observations--never. It was the most unprovoked egotism, all that I told you of my temper; for certainly I never suspected you of asking questions so. I was simply amused a little by what you said, and thought to myself (if you _will_ know my thoughts on that serious subject) that you had probably lived among very good-tempered persons, to hold such an opinion about the innocuousness of ill-temper. It was all I thought, indeed. Now to fancy that I was capable of suspecting you of such a manoeuvre! Why you would have _asked_ me directly;--if you had wished 'curiously to enquire.'

An excellent solemn chiming, the passage from Dante makes with your 'Sordello,' and the 'Sordello' _deserves_ the labour which it needs, to make it appear the great work it is. I think that the principle of association is too subtly in movement throughout it--so that _while_ you are going straight forward you go at the same time round and round, until the progress involved in the motion is lost sight of by the lookers on. Or did I tell you that before?

You have heard, I suppose, how Dickens's 'Cricket' sells by nineteen thousand copies at a time, though he takes Michael Angelo to be 'a humbug'--or for 'though' read 'because.' Tell me of Mr. Kenyon's dinner and Moxon?

Is not this an infinite letter? I shall hear from you, I hope.... I _ask_ you to let me hear soon. I write all sorts of things to you, rightly and wrongly perhaps; when wrongly forgive it. I think of you always. May God bless you. 'Love me for ever,' as

Your

_Ba_

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

25th Dec. [1845.]

My dear Christmas gift of a letter! I will write back a few lines, (all I can, having to go out now)--just that I may forever,--certainly during our mortal 'forever'--mix my love for you, and, as you suffer me to say, your love for me ... dearest! ... these shall be mixed with the other loves of the day and live therein--as I write, and trust, and know--forever! While I live I will remember what was my feeling in reading, and in writing, and in stopping from either ... as I have just done ... to kiss you and bless you with my whole heart.--Yes, yes, bless you, my own!

All is right, all of your letter ... admirably right and just in the defence of the women I _seemed_ to speak against; and only seemed--because that is a way of mine which you must have observed; that foolish concentrating of thought and feeling, for a moment, on some one little spot of a character or anything else indeed, and in the attempt to do justice and develop whatever may seem ordinarily to be overlooked in it,--that over vehement _insisting_ on, and giving an undue prominence to, the same--which has the effect of taking away from the importance of the rest of the related objects which, in truth, are not considered at all ... or they would also rise proportionally when subjected to the same (that is, correspondingly magnified and dilated) light and concentrated feeling. So, you remember, the old divine, preaching on 'small sins,' in his zeal to expose the tendencies and consequences usually made little account of, was led to maintain the said small sins to be 'greater than great ones.' _But then_ ... if you look on the world _altogether_, and accept the small natures, in their usual proportion with the greater ... things do not look _quite_ so bad; because the conduct which _is_ atrocious in those higher cases, of proposal and acceptance, _may_ be no more than the claims of the occasion justify (wait and hear) in certain other cases where the thing sought for and granted is avowedly less by a million degrees. It shall all be traffic, exchange (counting spiritual gifts as only coin, for our purpose), but surely the formalities and policies and decencies all vary with the nature of the thing trafficked for. If a man makes up his mind during half his life to acquire a Pitt-diamond or a Pilgrim-pearl--[he] gets witnesses and testimony and so forth--but, surely, when I pass a shop where oranges are ticketed up seven for sixpence I offend no law by sparing all words and putting down the piece with a certain authoritative ring on the counter. If instead of diamonds you want--(being a king or queen)--provinces with live men on them ... there is so much more diplomacy required; new interests are appealed to--high motives _supposed_, at all events--whereas, when, in Naples, a man asks leave to black your shoe in the dusty street 'purely for the honour of serving your Excellency' you laugh and would be sorry to find yourself without a 'grano' or two--(six of which, about, make a farthing)--Now do you not see! Where so little is to be got, why offer much more? If a man knows that ... but I am teaching you! All I mean is, that, in Benedick's phrase, 'the world must go on.' He who honestly wants his wife to sit at the head of his table and carve ... that is be his _help-meat_ (not 'help mete for him')--he shall assuredly find a girl of his degree who wants the table to sit at; and some dear friend to mortify, who _would_ be glad of such a piece of fortune; and if that man offers that woman a bunch of orange-flowers and a sonnet, instead of a buck-horn-handled sabre-shaped knife, sheathed in a 'Every Lady Her Own _Market-Woman_, Being a Table of' &c. &c.--_then_, I say he is--

Bless you, dearest--the clock strikes--and time is none--but--bless you!

Your own R.B.

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

Saturday 4. p.m.
[Post-mark, December 27, 1845.]

I was forced to leave off abruptly on Christmas Morning--and now I have but a few minutes before our inexorable post leaves. I hoped to return from Town earlier. But I can say something--and Monday will make amends.

'For ever' and for ever I _do_ love you, dearest--love you with my whole heart--in life, in death--

Yes; I did go to Mr. Kenyon's--who had a little to forgive in my slack justice to his good dinner, but was for the rest his own kind self--and I went, also, to Moxon's--who said something about my number's going off 'rather heavily'--so let it!

Too good, too, too indulgent you are, my own Ba, to 'acts' first or last; but all the same, I am glad and encouraged. _Let_ me get done with these, and better things will follow.

Now, bless you, ever, my sweetest--I have you ever in my thoughts--And on Monday, remember, I am to see you.

Your own R.B.

See what I cut out of a _Cambridge Advertiser_[1] of the 24th--to make you laugh!

[Footnote 1: The cutting enclosed is:--'A Few Rhymes for the Present Christmas' by J. Purchas, Esq., B.A. It is headed by several quotations, the first of which is signed 'Elizabeth B. Barrett:'

'This age shows to my thinking, still more infidels to Adam,
Than directly, by profession, simple infidels to God.'

This is followed by extracts from Pindar, 'Lear,' and the Hon. Mrs. Norton.]

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

Saturday.
[Post-mark, December 27, 1845.]

Yes, indeed, I have 'observed that way' in you, and not once, and not twice, and not twenty times, but oftener than any,--and almost every time ... do you know, ... with an uncomfortable feeling from the reflection that _that_ is the way for making all sorts of mistakes dependent on and issuing in exaggeration. It is the very way!--the highway.

For what you say in the letter here otherwise, I do not deny the truth--as partial truth:--I was speaking generally quite. Admit that I am not apt to be extravagant in my _esprit de sexe_: the Martineau doctrines of intellectual equality &c., I gave them up, you remember, like a woman--most disgracefully, as Mrs. Jameson would tell me. But we are not on that ground now--we are on ground worth holding a brief for!--and when women fail _here_ ... it is not so much our fault. Which was all I meant to say from the beginning.

It reminds me of the exquisite analysis in your 'Luria,' this third act, of the worth of a woman's sympathy,--indeed of the exquisite double-analysis of unlearned and learned sympathies. Nothing could be better, I think, than this:--

To the motive, the endeavour,--the heart's self--
Your quick sense looks; you crown and call aright
The soul of the purpose ere 'tis shaped as act,
Takes flesh i' the world, and clothes itself a king;

except the characterizing of the 'learned praise,' which comes afterwards in its fine subtle truth. What would these critics do to you, to what degree undo you, who would deprive you of the exercise of the discriminative faculty of the metaphysicians? As if a poet could be great without it! They might as well recommend a watchmaker to deal only in faces, in dials, and not to meddle with the wheels inside! You shall tell Mr. Forster so.

And speaking of 'Luria,' which grows on me the more I read, ... how fine he is when the doubt breaks on him--I mean, when he begins ... 'Why then, all is very well.' It is most affecting, I think, all that process of doubt ... and that reference to the friends at home (which at once proves him a stranger, and intimates, by just a stroke, that he will not look home for comfort out of the new foreign treason) is managed by you with singular dramatic dexterity....

... 'so slight, so slight,
And yet it tells you they are dead and gone'--

And then, the direct approach....

You now, so kind here, all you Florentines,
What is it in your eyes?--

Do you not feel it to be success, ... '_you_ now?' _I_ do, from my low ground as reader. The whole breaking round him of the cloud, and the manner in which he _stands_, facing it, ... I admire it all thoroughly. Braccio's vindication of Florence strikes me as almost too _poetically_ subtle for the man--but nobody could have the heart to wish a line of it away--_that_ would be too much for critical virtue!

I had your letter yesterday morning early. The post-office people were so resolved on keeping their Christmas, that they would not let me keep mine. No post all day, after that general post before noon, which never brings me anything worth the breaking of a seal!

Am I to see you on Monday? If there should be the least, least crossing of that day, ... anything to do, anything to see, anything to listen to,--remember how Tuesday stands close by, and that another Monday comes on the following week. Now I need not say _that_ every time, and you will please to remember it--Eccellenza!--

May God bless you--

Your

E.B.B.

From the _New Monthly Magazine_. 'The admirers of Robert Browning's poetry, and they are now very numerous, will be glad to hear of the issue by Mr. Moxon of a seventh series of the renowned "Bells" and delicious "Pomegranates," under the title of "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics."'

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

Tuesday.
[Post-mark, December 30, 1845.]

When you are gone I find your flowers; and you never spoke of nor showed them to me--so instead of yesterday I thank you to-day--thank you. Count among the miracles that your flowers live with me--I accept _that_ for an omen, dear--dearest! Flowers in general, all other flowers, die of despair when they come into the same atmosphere ... used to do it so constantly and observably that it made me melancholy and I left off for the most part having them here. Now you see how they put up with the close room, and condescend to me and the dust--it is true and no fancy! To be sure they know that I care for them and that I stand up by the table myself to change their water and cut their stalk freshly at intervals--_that_ may make a difference perhaps. Only the great reason must be that they are yours, and that you teach them to bear with me patiently.

Do not pretend even to misunderstand what I meant to say yesterday of dear Mr. Kenyon. His blame would fall as my blame of myself has fallen: he would say--will say--'it is ungenerous of her to let such a risk be run! I thought she would have been more generous.' There, is Mr. Kenyon's opinion as I foresee it! Not that it would be spoken, you know! he is too kind. And then, he said to me last summer, somewhere _à propos_ to the flies or butterflies, that he had 'long ceased to wonder at any extreme of foolishness produced by--_love_.' He will of course think you very very foolish, but not ungenerously foolish like other people.

Never mind. I do not mind indeed. I mean, that, having said to myself worse than the worst perhaps of what can be said against me by any who regard me at all, and feeling it put to silence by the fact that you _do_ feel so and so for me; feeling that fact to be an answer to all,--I cannot mind much, in comparison, the railing at second remove. There will be a nine days' railing of it and no more: and if on the ninth day you should not exactly wish never to have known me, the better reason will be demonstrated to stand with us. On this one point the wise man cannot judge for the fool his neighbour. If you _do_ love me, the inference is that you would be happier with than without me--and whether you do, you know better than another: so I think of _you_ and not of _them_--always of _you_! When I talked of being afraid of dear Mr. Kenyon, I just meant that he makes me nervous with his all-scrutinizing spectacles, put on for great occasions, and his questions which seem to belong to the spectacles, they go together so:--and then I have no presence of mind, as you may see without the spectacles. My only way of hiding (when people set themselves to look for me) would be the old child's way of getting behind the window curtains or under the sofa:--and even _that_ might not be effectual if I had recourse to it now. Do you think it would? Two or three times I fancied that Mr. Kenyon suspected something--but if he ever _did_, his only reproof was a reduplicated praise of _you_--he praises you always and in relation to every sort of subject.

What a _misomonsism_ you fell into yesterday, you who have much great work to do which no one else can do except just yourself!--and you, too, who have courage and knowledge, and must know that every work, with the principle of life in it, _will_ live, let it be trampled ever so under the heel of a faithless and unbelieving generation--yes, that it will live like one of your toads, for a thousand years in the heart of a rock. All men can teach at second or third hand, as you said ... by prompting the foremost rows ... by tradition and translation:--all, _except_ poets, who must preach their own doctrine and sing their own song, to be the means of any wisdom or any music, and therefore have stricter duties thrust upon them, and may not lounge in the [Greek: stoa] like the conversation-teachers. So much I have to say to you, till we are in the Siren's island--and _I_, jealous of the Siren!--

The Siren waits thee singing song for song,

says Mr. Landor. A prophecy which refuses to class you with the 'mute fishes,' precisely as I do.

And are you not my 'good'--all my good now--my only good ever? The Italians would say it better without saying more.

I had a letter from Miss Martineau this morning who accounts for her long silence by the supposition,--put lately to an end by scarcely credible information from Mr. Moxon, she says--that I was out of England; gone to the South from the 20th of September. She calls herself the strongest of women, and talks of 'walking fifteen miles one day and writing fifteen pages another day without fatigue,'--also of mesmerizing and of being infinitely happy except in the continued alienation of two of her family who cannot forgive her for getting well by such unlawful means. And she is to write again to tell me of Wordsworth, and promises to send me her new work in the meanwhile--all very kind.

So here is my letter to you, which you asked for so 'against the principles of universal justice.' Yes, very unjust--very unfair it was--only, you make me do just as you like in everything. Now confess to your own conscience that even if I had not a lawful claim of a debt against you, I might come to ask charity with another sort of claim, oh 'son of humanity.' Think how much more need of a letter _I_ have than you can have; and that if you have a giant's power, ''tis tyrannous to use it like a giant.' Who would take tribute from the desert? How I grumble. _Do_ let me have a letter directly! remember that no other light comes to my windows, and that I wait 'as those who watch for the morning'--'lux mea!'

May God bless you--and mind to say how you are _exactly_, and don't neglect the walking, _pray_ do not.

Your own

And after all, those women! A great deal of doctrine commends and discommends itself by the delivery: and an honest thing may be said so foolishly as to disprove its very honesty. Now after all, what did she mean by that very silly expression about books, but that she did not feel as she considered herself capable of feeling--and that else but _that_ was the meaning of the other woman? Perhaps it should have been spoken earlier--nay, clearly it should--but surely it was better spoken even in the last hour than not at all ... surely it is always and under all circumstances, better spoken at whatever cost--I have thought so steadily since I could think or feel at all. An entire openness to the last moment of possible liberty, at whatever cost and consequence, is the most honourable and most merciful way, both for men and women! perhaps for men in an especial manner. But I shall send this letter away, being in haste to get change for it.

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

Wednesday, December 31, 1845.

I have been properly punished for so much treachery as went to that re-urging the prayer that _you_ would begin writing, when all the time (after the first of those words had been spoken which bade _me_ write) I was full of purpose to send my own note last evening; one which should do its best to thank you: but see, the punishment! At home I found a note from Mr. Horne--on the point of setting out for Ireland, too unwell to manage to come over to me; anxious, so he said, to see me before leaving London, and with only Tuesday or to-day to allow the opportunity of it, if I should choose to go and find him out. So I considered all things and determined to go--but not till so late did I determine on Tuesday, that there was barely time to get to Highgate--wherefore no letter reached you to beg pardon ... and now this undeserved--beyond the usual undeservedness--this last-day-of-the-Year's gift--do you think or not think my gratitude weighs on me? When I lay this with the others, and remember what you have done for me--I do bless you--so as I cannot but believe must reach the all-beloved head all my hopes and fancies and cares fly straight to. Dearest, whatever change the new year brings with it, we are together--I can give you no more of myself--indeed, you give me now (back again if you choose, but changed and renewed by your possession) the powers that seemed most properly mine. I could only mean that, by the expressions to which you refer--only could mean that you were my crown and palm branch, now and for ever, and so, that it was a very indifferent matter to me if the world took notice of that fact or no. Yes, dearest, that _is_ the meaning of the prophecy, which I was stupidly blind not to have read and taken comfort from long ago. You ARE the veritable Siren--and you 'wait me,' and will sing 'song for song.' And this is my first song, my true song--this love I bear you--I look into my heart and then let it go forth under that name--love. I am more than mistrustful of many other feelings in me: they are not earnest enough; so far, not true enough--but this is all the flower of my life which you call forth and which lies at your feet.

Now let me say it--what you are to remember. That if I had the slightest doubt, or fear, I would utter it to you on the instant--secure in the incontested stability of the main _fact_, even though the heights at the verge in the distance should tremble and prove vapour--and there would be a deep consolation in your forgiveness--indeed, yes; but I tell you, on solemn consideration, it does seem to me that--once take away the broad and general words that admit in their nature of any freight they can be charged with,--put aside love, and devotion, and trust--and _then_ I seem to have said _nothing_ of my feeling to you--nothing whatever.

I will not write more now on this subject. Believe you are my blessing and infinite reward beyond possible desert in intention,--my life has been crowned by you, as I said!

May God bless you ever--through you I shall be blessed. May I kiss your cheek and pray this, my own, all-beloved?

I must add a word or two of other things. I am very well now, quite well--am walking and about to walk. Horne, or rather his friends, reside in the very lane Keats loved so much--Millfield Lane. Hunt lent me once the little copy of the first Poems dedicated to him--and on the title-page was recorded in Hunt's delicate characters that 'Keats met him with this, the presentation-copy, or whatever was the odious name, in M---- Lane--called Poets' Lane by the gods--Keats came running, holding it up in his hand.' Coleridge had an affection for the place, and Shelley '_knew_' it--and I can testify it is green and silent, with pleasant openings on the grounds and ponds, through the old trees that line it. But the hills here are far more open and wild and hill-like; not with the eternal clump of evergreens and thatched summer house--to say nothing of the 'invisible railing' miserably visible everywhere.

You very well know _what_ a vision it is you give me--when you speak of _standing up by the table_ to care for my flowers--(which I will never be ashamed of again, by the way--I will say for the future; 'here are my best'--in this as in other things.) Now, do you remember, that once I bade you not surprise me out of my good behaviour by standing to meet me unawares, as visions do, some day--but now--_omne ignotum_? No, dearest!

Ought I to say there will be two days more? till Saturday--and if one word comes, _one_ line--think! I am wholly yours--yours, beloved!

R.B.

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

January 1, 1845 [1846].

How good you are--how best! it is a favourite play of my memory to take up the thought of what you were to me (to my mind gazing!) years ago, as the poet in an abstraction--then the thoughts of you, a little clearer, in concrete personality, as Mr. Kenyon's friend, who had dined with him on such a day, or met him at dinner on such another, and said some great memorable thing 'on Wednesday last,' and enquired kindly about _me_ perhaps on Thursday,--till I was proud! and so, the thoughts of you, nearer and nearer (yet still afar!) as the Mr. Browning who meant to do me the honour of writing to me, and who did write; and who asked me once in a letter (does he remember?) 'not to lean out of the window while his foot was on the stair!'--to take up all those thoughts, and more than those, one after another, and tie them together with all _these_, which cannot be named so easily--which cannot be classed in botany and Greek. It is a nosegay of mystical flowers, looking strangely and brightly, and keeping their May-dew through the Christmases--better than even _your_ flowers! And I am not 'ashamed' of mine, ... be very sure! no!

For the siren, I never suggested to you any such thing--why you do not pretend to have read such a suggestion in my letter certainly. _That_ would have been most exemplarily modest of me! would it not, O Ulysses?

And you meant to write, ... you _meant_! and went to walk in 'Poet's lane' instead, (in the 'Aonius of Highgate') which I remember to have read of--does not Hunt speak of it in his Memoirs?--and so now there is another track of light in the traditions of the place, and people may talk of the pomegranate-smell between the hedges. So you really have _hills_ at New Cross, and not hills by courtesy? I was at Hampstead once--and there was something attractive to me in that fragment of heath with its wild smell, thrown down ... like a Sicilian rose from Proserpine's lap when the car drove away, ... into all that arid civilization, 'laurel-clumps and invisible visible fences,' as you say!--and the grand, eternal smoke rising up in the distance, with its witness against nature! People grew severely in jest about cockney landscape--but is it not true that the trees and grass in the close neighbourhood of great cities must of necessity excite deeper emotion than the woods and valleys will, a hundred miles off, where human creatures ruminate stupidly as the cows do, the 'county families' es-_chewing_ all men who are not 'landed proprietors,' and the farmers never looking higher than to the fly on the uppermost turnip-leaf! Do you know at all what English country-life is, which the English praise so, and 'moralize upon into a thousand similes,' as that one greatest, purest, noblest thing in the world--the purely English and excellent thing? It is to my mind simply and purely abominable, and I would rather live in a street than be forced to live it out,--that English country-life; for I don't mean life in the country. The social exigencies--why, nothing _can_ be so bad--nothing! That is the way by which Englishmen grow up to top the world in their peculiar line of respectable absurdities.

Think of my talking so as if I could be vexed with any one of them! _I!_--On the contrary I wish them all a happy new year to abuse one another, or visit each of them his nearest neighbour whom he hates, three times a week, because 'the distance is so convenient,' and give great dinners in noble rivalship (venison from the Lord Lieutenant against turbot from London!), and talk popularity and game-law by turns to the tenantry, and beat down tithes to the rector. This glorious England of ours; with its peculiar glory of the rural districts! And _my_ glory of patriotic virtue, who am so happy in spite of it all, and make a pretence of talking--talking--while I think the whole time of your letter. I think of your letter--I am no more a patriot than _that_!

May God bless you, best and dearest! You say things to me which I am not worthy to listen to for a moment, even if I was deaf dust the next moment.... I confess it humbly and earnestly as before God.

Yet He knows,--if the entireness of a gift means anything,--that I have not given with a reserve, that I am yours in my life and soul, for this year and for other years. Let me be used _for_ you rather than _against_ you! and that unspeakable, immeasurable grief of feeling myself a stone in your path, a cloud in your sky, may I be saved from it!--pray it for _me_ ... for _my_ sake rather than _yours_. For the rest, I thank you, I thank you. You will be always to me, what to-day you are--and that is all!--!

I am your own--

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

Sunday Night.
[Post-mark, January 5, 1846.]

Yesterday, nearly the last thing, I bade you 'think of me'--I wonder if you could misunderstand me in that?--As if my words or actions or any of my ineffectual outside-self _should_ be thought of, unless to be forgiven! But I do, dearest, feel confident that while I am in your mind--cared for, rather than thought about--no great harm can happen to me; and as, for great harm to reach me, it must pass through you, you will care for yourself; _my_self, best self!

Come, let us talk. I found Horne's book at home, and have had time to see that fresh beautiful things are there--I suppose 'Delora' will stand alone still--but I got pleasantly smothered with that odd shower of wood-spoils at the end, the dwarf-story; cup-masses and fern and spotty yellow leaves,--all that, I love heartily--and there is good sailor-speech in the 'Ben Capstan'--though he does knock a man down with a 'crow-bar'--instead of a marling-spike or, even, a belaying-pin! The first tale, though good, seems least new and individual, but I must know more. At one thing I wonder--his not reprinting a quaint clever _real_ ballad, published before 'Delora,' on the 'Merry Devil of Edmonton'--the first of his works I ever read. No, the very first piece was a single stanza, if I remember, in which was this line: 'When bason-crested Quixote, lean and bold,'--good, is it not? Oh, while it strikes me, good, too, _is_ that 'Swineshead Monk' ballad! Only I miss the old chronicler's touch on the method of concocting the poison: 'Then stole this Monk into the Garden and under a certain herb found out a Toad, which, squeezing into a cup,' &c. something to that effect. I suspect, _par parenthèse_, you have found out by this time my odd liking for 'vermin'--you once wrote '_your_ snails'--and certainly snails are old clients of mine--but efts! Horne traced a line to me--in the rhymes of a ''prentice-hand' I used to look over and correct occasionally--taxed me (last week) with having altered the wise line 'Cold as a _lizard_ in a _sunny_ stream' to 'Cold as a newt hid in a shady brook'--for 'what do _you_ know about newts?' he asked of the author--who thereupon confessed. But never try and catch a speckled gray lizard when we are in Italy, love, and you see his tail hang out of the chink of a wall, his winter-house--because the strange tail will snap off, drop from him and stay in your fingers--and though you afterwards learn that there is more desperation in it and glorious determination to be free, than positive pain (so people say who have no tails to be twisted off)--and though, moreover, the tail grows again after a sort--_yet_ ... don't do it, for it will give you a thrill! What a fine fellow our English water-eft is; 'Triton paludis Linnaei'--_e come guizza_ (_that_ you can't say in another language; cannot preserve the little in-and-out motion along with the straightforwardness!)--I always loved all those wild creatures God '_sets up for themselves_' so independently of us, so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them; while we run about and against each other with our great cressets and fire-pots. I once saw a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole; his nest, no doubt; or tomb, perhaps--'Safe as Oedipus's grave-place, 'mid Colone's olives swart'--(Kiss me, my Siren!)--Well, it seemed awful to watch that bee--he seemed so _instantly_ from the teaching of God! Ælian says that ... a _frog_, does he say?--some animal, having to swim across the Nile, never fails to provide himself with a bit of reed, which he bites off and holds in his mouth transversely and so puts from shore gallantly ... because when the water-serpent comes swimming to meet him, there is the reed, wider than his serpent's jaws, and no hopes of a swallow that time--now fancy the two meeting heads, the frog's wide eyes and the vexation of the snake!

Now, see! do I deceive you? Never say I began by letting down my dignity 'that with no middle flight intends to soar above the Aonian Mount'!--

My best, dear, dear one,--may you be better, less _depressed_, ... I can hardly imagine frost reaching you if I could be by you. Think what happiness you mean to give me,--what a life; what a death! 'I may change'--too true; yet, you see, as an eft was to me at the beginning so it continues--I _may_ take up stones and pelt the next I see--but--do you much fear that?--Now, _walk_, move, _guizza, anima mia dolce_. Shall I not know one day how far your mouth will be from mine as we walk? May I let that stay ... dearest, (the _line_ stay, not the mouth)?

I am not very well to-day--or, rather, have not been so--_now_, I am well and _with you_. I just say that, very needlessly, but for strict frankness' sake. Now, you are to write to me soon, and tell me all about your self, and to love me ever, as I love you ever, and bless you, and leave you in the hands of God--My own love!--

Tell me if I do wrong to send _this_ by a morning post--so as to reach you earlier than the evening--when you will ... write to me?

Don't let me forget to say that I shall receive the _Review_ to-morrow, and will send it directly.

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

Sunday.
[Post-mark, January 6, 1846.]

When you get Mr. Horne's book you will understand how, after reading just the first and the last poems, I could not help speaking coldly a little of it--and in fact, estimating his power as much as you can do, I did think and do, that the last was unworthy of him, and that the first might have been written by a writer of one tenth of his faculty. But last night I read the 'Monk of Swineshead Abbey' and the 'Three Knights of Camelott' and 'Bedd Gelert' and found them all of different stuff, better, stronger, more consistent, and read them with pleasure and admiration. Do you remember this application, among the countless ones of shadow to the transiency of life? I give the first two lines for clearness--

Like to the cloud upon the hill
We are a moment seen
Or the _shadow of the windmill-sail
Across yon sunny slope of green_.

New or not, and I don't remember it elsewhere, it is just and beautiful I think. Think how the shadow of the windmill-sail just touches the ground on a bright windy day! the shadow of a bird flying is not faster! Then the 'Three Knights' has beautiful things, with more definite and distinct images than he is apt to show--for his character is a vague grand massiveness,--like Stonehenge--or at least, if 'towers and battlements he sees' they are 'bosomed high' in dusky clouds ... it is a 'passion-created imagery' which has no clear outline. In this ballad of the 'Knights,' and in the Monk's too, we may _look at_ things, as on the satyr who swears by his horns and mates not with his kind afterwards, 'While, _holding beards_, they dance in pairs--and that is all excellent and reminds one of those fine sylvan festivals, 'in Orion.' But now tell me if you like altogether 'Ben Capstan' and if you consider the sailor-idiom to be lawful in poetry, because I do not indeed. On the same principle we may have Yorkshire and Somersetshire 'sweet Doric'; and do recollect what it ended in of old, in the Blowsibella heroines. Then for the Elf story ... why should such things be written by men like Mr. Horne? I am vexed at it. Shakespeare and Fletcher did not write so about fairies:--Drayton did not. Look at the exquisite 'Nymphidia,' with its subtle sylvan consistency, and then at the lumbering coarse ... '_machina intersit_' ... Grandmama Grey!--to say nothing of the 'small dog' that isn't the 'small boy.' Mr. Horne succeeds better on a larger canvass, and with weightier material; with blank verse rather than lyrics. He cannot make a fine stroke. He wants subtlety and elasticity in the thought and expression. Remember, I admire him honestly and earnestly. No one has admired more than I the 'Death of Marlowe,' scenes in 'Cosmo,' and 'Orion' in much of it. But now tell me if you can accept with the same stretched out hand all these lyrical poems? I am going to write to him as much homage as can come truly. Who combines different faculties as you do, striking the whole octave? No one, at present in the world.

Dearest, after you went away yesterday and I began to consider, I found that there was nothing to be so over-glad about in the matter of the letters, for that, Sunday coming next to Saturday, the best now is only as good as the worst before, and I can't hear from you, until Monday ... Monday! Did you think of _that_--you who took the credit of acceding so meekly! I shall not praise you in return at any rate. I shall have to wait ... till what o'clock on Monday, tempted in the meanwhile to fall into controversy against the 'new moons and sabbath days' and the pausing of the post in consequence.

You never guessed perhaps, what I look back to at this moment in the physiology of our intercourse, the curious double feeling I had about you--you personally, and you as the writer of these letters, and the crisis of the feeling, when I was positively vexed and jealous of myself for not succeeding better in making a unity of the two. I could not! And moreover I could not help but that the writer of the letters seemed nearer to me, long ... long ... and in spite of the postmark, than did the personal visitor who confounded me, and left me constantly under such an impression of its being all dream-work on his side, that I have stamped my feet on this floor with impatience to think of having to wait so many hours before the 'candid' closing letter could come with its confessional of an illusion. 'People say,' I used to think, 'that women _always_ know, and certainly I do not know, and therefore ... therefore.'--The logic crushed on like Juggernaut's car. But in the letters it was different--the dear letters took me on the side of my own ideal life where I was able to stand a little upright and look round. I could read such letters for ever and answer them after a fashion ... that, I felt from the beginning. But _you_--!

_Monday._--Never too early can the light come. Thank you for my letter! Yet you look askance at me over 'newt and toad,' and praise so the Elf-story that I am ashamed to send you my ill humour on the same head. And you really like _that_? admire it? Grandmama Grey and the night cap and all? and 'shoetye and blue sky?' and is it really wrong of me to like certainly some touches and images, but not the whole, ... not the poem as a whole? I can take delight in the fantastical, and in the grotesque--but here there is a want of life and consistency, as it seems to me!--the elf is no elf and speaks no elf-tongue: it is not the right key to touch, ... this, ... for supernatural music. So I fancy at least--but I will try the poem again presently. You must be right--unless it should be your over-goodness opposed to my over-badness--I will not be sure. Or you wrote perhaps in an accidental mood of most excellent critical smoothness, such as Mr. Forster did his last _Examiner_ in, when he gave the all-hail to Mr. Harness as one of the best dramatists of the age!! Ah no!--not such as Mr. Forster's. Your soul does not enter into his secret--There can be nothing in common between you. For him to say such a word--he who knows--or ought to know!--And now let us agree and admire the bowing of the old ministrel over Bedd Gelert's unfilled grave--

The _long_ beard _fell_ like _snow_ into the grave
With solemn grace

A poet, a friend, a generous man Mr. Horne is, even if no laureate for the fairies.

I have this moment a parcel of books via Mr. Moxon--Miss Martineau's two volumes--and Mr. Bailey sends his 'Festus,' very kindly, ... and 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' from America from a Mrs. or a Miss Fuller--how I hate those 'Women of England,' 'Women and their Mission' and the rest. As if any possible good were to be done by such expositions of rights and wrongs.

Your letter would be worth them all, if _you_ were less _you_! I mean, just this letter, ... all alive as it is with crawling buzzing wriggling cold-blooded warm-blooded creatures ... as all alive as your own pedant's book in the tree. And do you know, I think I like frogs too--particularly the very little leaping frogs, which are so high-hearted as to emulate the birds. I remember being scolded by my nurses for taking them up in my hands and letting them leap from one hand to the other. But for the toad!--why, at the end of the row of narrow beds which we called our gardens when we were children, grew an old thorn, and in the hollow of the root of the thorn, lived a toad, a great ancient toad, whom I, for one, never dared approach too nearly. That he 'wore a jewel in his head' I doubted nothing at all. You must see it glitter if you stooped and looked steadily into the hole. And on days when he came out and sate swelling his black sides, I never looked steadily; I would run a hundred yards round through the shrubs, deeper than knee-deep in the long wet grass and nettles, rather than go past him where he sate; being steadily of opinion, in the profundity of my natural history-learning, that if he took it into his toad's head to spit at me I should drop down dead in a moment, poisoned as by one of the Medici.

Oh--and I had a field-mouse for a pet once, and should have joined my sisters in a rat's nest if I had not been ill at the time (as it was, the little rats were tenderly smothered by over-love!): and blue-bottle flies I used to feed, and hated your spiders for them; yet no, not much. My aversion proper ... call it horror rather ... was for the silent, cold, clinging, gliding _bat_; and even now, I think, I could not sleep in the room with that strange bird-mouse-creature, as it glides round the ceiling silently, silently as its shadow does on the floor. If you listen or look, there is not a wave of the wing--the wing never waves! A bird without a feather! a beast that flies! and so cold! as cold as a fish! It is the most supernatural-seeming of natural things. And then to see how when the windows are open at night those bats come sailing ... without a sound--and go ... you cannot guess where!--fade with the night-blackness!

You have not been well--which is my first thought if not my first word. Do walk, and do not work; and think ... what I could be thinking of, if I did not think of _you_ ... dear--dearest! 'As the doves fly to the windows,' so I think of you! As the prisoners think of liberty, as the dying think of Heaven, so I think of you. When I look up straight to God ... nothing, no one, used to intercept me--now there is _you_--only you under him! Do not use such words as those therefore any more, nor say that you are not to be thought of so and so. You are to be thought of every way. You must know what you are to me if you know at all what _I_ am,--and what I should be but for you.

So ... love me a little, with the spiders and the toads and the lizards! love me as you love the efts--and I will believe in _you_ as you believe ... in Ælian--Will _that_ do?

Your own--

Say how you are when you write--_and write_.

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

Tuesday Morning.

I this minute receive the Review--a poor business, truly! Is there a reason for a man's wits dwindling the moment he gets into a critical High-place to hold forth?--I have only glanced over the article however. Well, one day _I_ am to write of you, dearest, and it must come to something rather better than _that_!

I am forced to send now what is to be sent at all. Bless you, dearest. I am trusting to hear from you--

Your R.B.

And I find by a note from a fairer friend and favourer of mine that in the _New Quarterly_ 'Mr. Browning' figures pleasantly as 'one without any sympathy for a human being!'--Then, for newts and efts at all events!

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

Tuesday Night.
[Post-mark, January 7, 1846.]

But, my sweet, there is safer going in letters than in visits, do you not see? In the letter, one may go to the utmost limit of one's supposed tether without danger--there is the distance so palpably between the most audacious step _there_, and the next ... which is nowhere, seeing it is not in the letter. Quite otherwise in personal intercourse, where any indication of turning to a certain path, even, might possibly be checked not for its own fault but lest, the path once reached and proceeded in, some other forbidden turning might come into sight, we will say. In the letter, all ended _there_, just there ... and you may think of that, and forgive; at all events, may avoid speaking irrevocable words--and when, as to me, those words are intensely _true, doom-words_--think, dearest! Because, as I told you once, what most characterizes my feeling for you is the perfect _respect_ in it, the full _belief_ ... (I shall get presently to poor Robert's very avowal of 'owing you all esteem'!). It is on that I build, and am secure--for how should I know, of myself, how to serve you and be properly yours if it all was to be learnt by my own interpreting, and what you professed to dislike you were to be considered as wishing for, and what liking, as it seemed, you were loathing at your heart, and if so many 'noes' made a 'yes,' and 'one refusal no rebuff' and all that horrible bestiality which stout gentlemen turn up the whites of their eyes to, when they rise after dinner and pressing the right hand to the left side say, 'The toast be dear woman!' Now, love, with this feeling in me from the beginning,--I do believe,--_now_, when I am utterly blest in this gift of your love, and least able to imagine what I should do without it,--I cannot but believe, I say, that had you given me once a 'refusal'--clearly derived from your own feelings, and quite apart from any fancied consideration for my interests; had this come upon me, whether slowly but inevitably in the course of events, or suddenly as precipitated by any step of mine; I should, _believing you_, have never again renewed directly or indirectly such solicitation; I should have begun to count how many other ways were yet open to serve you and devote myself to you ... but from _the outside_, now, and not in your livery! Now, if I should have acted thus under _any_ circumstances, how could I but redouble my endeavours at precaution after my own foolish--you know, and forgave long since, and I, too, am forgiven in my own eyes, for the cause, though not the manner--but could I do other than keep 'farther from you' than in the letters, dearest? For your own part in that matter, seeing it with all the light you have since given me (and _then_, not inadequately by my own light) I could, I do kiss your feet, kiss every letter in your name, bless you with my whole heart and soul if I could pour them out, from me, before you, to stay and be yours; when I think on your motives and pure perfect generosity. It was the plainness of _that_ which determined me to wait and be patient and grateful and your own for ever in any shape or capacity you might please to accept. Do you think that because I am so rich now, I could not have been most rich, too, _then_--in what would seem little only to _me_, only with this great happiness? I should have been proud beyond measure--happy past all desert, to call and be allowed to see you simply, speak with you and be spoken to--what am I more than others? Don't think this mock humility--_it is not_--you take me in your mantle, and we shine together, but I know my part in it! All this is written breathlessly on a sudden fancy that you _might_--if not now, at some future time--give other than this, the true reason, for that discrepancy you see, that nearness in the letters, that early farness in the visits! And, love, all love is but a passionate _drawing closer_--I would be one with you, dearest; let my soul press close to you, as my lips, dear life of my life.