July 25, 1845.
Are you any better to-day? and will you say just the truth of it? and not attempt to do any of the writing which does harm — nor of the reading even, which may do harm — and something does harm to you, you see — and you told me not long ago that you knew how to avoid the harm . . . now, did you not? and what could it have been last week which you did not avoid, and which made you so unwell? Beseech you not to think that I am going to aid and abet in this wronging of yourself, for I will not indeed — and I am only sorry to have given you my querulous queries yesterday . . . and to have omitted to say in relation to them, too, how they were to be accepted in any case as just passing thoughts of mine for your passing thoughts, . . . some right, it may be . . . some wrong, it must be . . . and none, insisted on even by the thinker! just impressions, and by no means pretending to be judgments — now will you understand? Also, I intended (as a proof of my fallacy) to strike out one or two of my doubts before I gave the paper to you — so whichever strikes you as the most foolish of them, of course must be what I meant to strike out — (there’s ingenuity for you!). The poem did, for the rest, as will be suggested to you, give me the very greatest pleasure, and astonish me in two ways . . . by the versification, mechanically considered; and by the successful evolution of pure beauty from all that roughness and rudeness of the sin of the boar-pinner — successfully evolved, without softening one hoarse accent of his voice. But there is to be a pause now — you will not write any more — no, nor come here on Wednesday, if coming into the roar of this London should make the pain worse, as I cannot help thinking it must — and you were not well yesterday morning, you admitted. You will take care? And if there should be a wisdom in going away . . .!
Was it very wrong of me, doing what I told you of yesterday? Very imprudent, I am afraid — but I never knew how to be prudent — and then, there is not a sharing of responsibility in any sort of imaginable measure; but a mere going away of so many thoughts, apart from the thinker, or of words, apart from the speaker, . . . just as I might give away a pocket-handkerchief to be newly marked and mine no longer. I did not do — and would not have done, . . . one of those papers singly. It would have been unbecoming of me in every way. It was simply a writing of notes . . . of slips of paper . . . now on one subject, and now on another . . . which were thrown into the great cauldron and boiled up with other matter, and re-translated from my idiom where there seemed a need for it. And I am not much afraid of being ever guessed at — except by those Oedipuses who astounded me once for a moment and were after all, I hope, baffled by the Sphinx — or ever betrayed; because besides the black Stygian oaths and indubitable honour of the editor, he has some interest, even as I have the greatest, in being silent and secret. And nothing is mine . . . if something is of me . . . or from me, rather. Yet it was wrong and foolish, I see plainly — wrong in all but the motives. How dreadful to write against time, and with a side-ways running conscience! And then the literature of the day was wider than his knowledge, all round! And the booksellers were barking distraction on every side! — I had some of the mottos to find too! But the paper relating to you I never was consulted about — or in one particular way it would have been better, — as easily it might have been. May God bless you, my dear friend,
E.B.B.