Month: August 2017

Sunday.

[August 31, 1845.]

I did not think you were angry — I never said so. But you might reasonably have been wounded a little, if you had suspected me of blaming you for any bearing of yours towards myself; and this was the amount of my fear — or rather hope  . . . since I conjectured most that you were not well. And after all you did think  . . . do think  . . . that in some way or for some moment I blamed you, disbelieved you, distrusted you — or why this letter? How have I provoked this letter? Can I forgive myself for having even seemed to have provoked it? and will you believe me that if for the past’s sake you sent it, it was unnecessary, and if for the future’s, irrelevant? Which I say from no want of sensibility to the words of it — your words always make themselves felt — but in fulness of purpose not to suffer you to hold to words because they have been said, nor to say them as if to be holden by them. Why, if a thousand more such words were said by you to me, how could they operate upon the future or present, supposing me to choose to keep the possible modification of your feelings, as a probability, in my sight and yours? Can you help my sitting with the doors all open if I think it right? I do attest to you — while I trust you, as you must see, in word and act, and while I am confident that no human being ever stood higher or purer in the eyes of another, than you do in mine, — that you would still stand high and remain unalterably my friend, if the probability in question became a fact, as now at this moment. And this I must say, since you have said other things: and this alone, which I have said, concerns the future, I remind you earnestly.

My dearest friend — you have followed the most generous of impulses in your whole bearing to me — and I have recognised and called by its name, in my heart, each one of them. Yet I cannot help adding that, of us two, yours has not been quite the hardest part  . . . I mean, to a generous nature like your own, to which every sort of nobleness comes easily. Mine has been more difficult — and I have sunk under it again and again: and the sinking and the effort to recover the duty of a lost position, may have given me an appearance of vacillation and lightness, unworthy at least of you, and perhaps of both of us. Notwithstanding which appearance, it was right and just (only just) of you, to believe in me — in my truth — because I have never failed to you in it, nor been capable of such failure: the thing I have said, I have meant  . . . always: and in things I have not said, the silence has had a reason somewhere different perhaps from where you looked for it. And this brings me to complaining that you, who profess to believe in me, do yet obviously believe that it was only merely silence, which I required of you on one occasion — and that if I had ‘known your power over yourself,’ I should not have minded  . . . no! In other words you believe of me that I was thinking just of my own (what shall I call it for a motive base and small enough?) my own scrupulousness  . . . freedom from embarrassment! of myself in the least of me; in the tying of my shoestrings, say! — so much and no more! Now this is so wrong, as to make me impatient sometimes in feeling it to be your impression: I asked for silence — but also and chiefly for the putting away of  . . . you know very well what I asked for. And this was sincerely done, I attest to you. You wrote once to me  . . . oh, long before May and the day we met: that you ‘had been so happy, you should be now justified to yourself in taking any step most hazardous to the happiness of your life’ — but if you were justified, could I be therefore justified in abetting such a step, — the step of wasting, in a sense, your best feelings  . . . of emptying your water gourds into the sand? What I thought then I think now — just what any third person, knowing you, would think, I think and feel. I thought too, at first, that the feeling on your part was a mere generous impulse, likely to expand itself in a week perhaps. It affects me and has affected me, very deeply, more than I dare attempt to say, that you should persist so — and if sometimes I have felt, by a sort of instinct, that after all you would not go on to persist, and that (being a man, you know) you might mistake, a little unconsciously, the strength of your own feeling; you ought not to be surprised; when I felt it was more advantageous and happier for you that it should be so. In any case, I shall never regret my own share in the events of this summer, and your friendship will be dear to me to the last. You know I told you so — not long since. And as to what you say otherwise, you are right in thinking that I would not hold by unworthy motives in avoiding to speak what you had any claim to hear. But what could I speak that would not be unjust to you? Your life! if you gave it to me and I put my whole heart into it; what should I put but anxiety, and more sadness than you were born to? What could I give you, which it would not be ungenerous to give? Therefore we must leave this subject — and I must trust you to leave it without one word more; (too many have been said already — but I could not let your letter pass quite silently  . . . as if I had nothing to do but to receive all as matter of course so!) while you may well trust me to remember to my life’s end, as the grateful remember; and to feel, as those do who have felt sorrow (for where these pits are dug, the water will stand), the full price of your regard. May God bless you, my dearest friend. I shall send this letter after I have seen you, and hope you may not have expected to hear sooner.

Ever yours,

E.B.B.

Monday, 6 p.m. — I send in disobedience to your commands, Mrs. Shelley’s book — but when books accumulate and when besides, I want to let you have the American edition of my poems  . . . famous for all manner of blunders, you know; what is to be done but have recourse to the parcel-medium? You were in jest about being at Pisa before or as soon as we were? — oh no — that must not be indeed — we must wait a little! — even if you determine to go at all, which is a question of doubtful expediency. Do take more exercise, this week, and make war against those dreadful sensations in the head — now, will you?

 

August 30, 1845.

Can you understand me so, dearest friend, after all? Do you see me  – – when I am away, or with you  – – ‘taking offence’ at words, ‘being vexed’ at words, or deeds of yours, even if I could not immediately trace them to their source of entire, pure kindness; as I have hitherto done in every smallest instance?

I believe in you absolutely, utterly  – – I believe that when you bade me, that time, be silent  – – that such was your bidding, and I was silent  – – dare I say I think you did not know at that time the power I have over myself, that I could sit and speak and listen as I have done since? Let me say now  – – this only once  – – that I loved you from my soul, and gave you my life, so much of it as you would take,  – – and all that is done, not to be altered now: it was, in the nature of the proceeding, wholly independent of any return on your part. I will not think on extremes you might have resorted to; as it is, the assurance of your friendship, the intimacy to which you admit me, now, make the truest, deepest joy of my life  – – a joy I can never think fugitive while we are in life, because I know, as to me, I could not willingly displease you,  – – while, as to you, your goodness and understanding will always see to the bottom of involuntary or ignorant faults  – – always help me to correct them. I have done now. If I thought you were like other women I have known, I should say so much!  – – but  – – (my first and last word  – – I believe in you!)  – – what you could and would give me, of your affection, you would give nobly and simply and as a giver  – – you would not need that I tell you  – – (tell you!)  – – what would be supreme happiness to me in the event  – – however distant  – –

I repeat  . . . I call on your justice to remember, on your intelligence to believe  . . . that this is merely a more precise stating the first subject; to put an end to any possible misunderstanding  – – to prevent your henceforth believing that because I do not write, from thinking too deeply of you, I am offended, vexed &c. &c. I will never recur to this, nor shall you see the least difference in my manner next Monday: it is indeed, always before me  . . . how I know nothing of you and yours. But I think I ought to have spoken when I did  – – and to speak clearly  . . . or more clearly what I do, as it is my pride and duty to fall back, now, on the feeling with which I have been in the meantime  – – Yours  – – God bless you  – –

R.B.

Let me write a few words to lead into Monday  – – and say, you have probably received my note. I am much better  – – with a little headache, which is all, and fast going this morning. Of yours you say nothing  – – I trust you see your  . . . dare I say your duty in the Pisa affair, as all else must see it  – – shall I hear on Monday? And my ‘Saul’ that you are so lenient to.

Bless you ever  – –

 

August 30, 1845.

This sweet Autumn Evening, Friday, comes all golden into the room and makes me write to you  – – not think of you  – – yet what shall I write?

It must be for another time  . . . after Monday, when I am to see you, you know, and hear if the headache be gone, since your note would not round to the perfection of kindness and comfort, and tell me so.

God bless my dearest friend.

R.B.

I am much better  – – well, indeed  – – thank you.

 

Friday Evening.

August 30, 1845.

I do not hear; and come to you to ask the alms of just one line, having taken it into my head that something is the matter. It is not so much exactingness on my part, as that you spoke of meaning to write as soon as you received a note of mine  . . . which went to you five minutes afterwards  . . . which is three days ago, or will be when you read this. Are you not well — or what? Though I have tried and wished to remember having written in the last note something very or even a little offensive to you, I failed in it and go back to the worse fear. For you could not be vexed with me for talking of what was ‘your fault’  . . . ‘your own fault,’ viz. in having to read sentences which, but for your commands, would have been blotted out. You could not very well take that for serious blame! from me too, who have so much reason and provocation for blaming the archangel Gabriel. — No — you could not misinterpret so, — and if you could not, and if you are not displeased with me, you must be unwell, I think. I took for granted yesterday that you had gone out as before — but to-night it is different — and so I come to ask you to be kind enough to write one word for me by some post to-morrow. Now remember  . . . I am not asking for a letter — but for a word  . . . or line strictly speaking.

Ever yours, dear friend,

E.B.B.

 

Wednesday Morning,

August 27, 1845.

But your ‘Saul’ is unobjectionable as far as I can see, my dear friend. He was tormented by an evil spirit — but how, we are not told  . . . and the consolation is not obliged to be definite,  . . . is it? A singer was sent for as a singer — and all that you are called upon to be true to, are the general characteristics of David the chosen, standing between his sheep and his dawning hereafter, between innocence and holiness, and with what you speak of as the ‘gracious gold locks’ besides the chrism of the prophet, on his own head — and surely you have been happy in the tone and spirit of these lyrics  . . . broken as you have left them. Where is the wrong in all this? For the right and beauty, they are more obvious — and I cannot tell you how the poem holds me and will not let me go until it blesses me  . . . and so, where are the ‘sixty lines’ thrown away? I do beseech you  . . . you who forget nothing,  . . . to remember them directly, and to go on with the rest  . . . as directly (be it understood) as is not injurious to your health. The whole conception of the poem, I like  . . . and the execution is exquisite up to this point — and the sight of Saul in the tent, just struck out of the dark by that sunbeam, ‘a thing to see,’  . . . not to say that afterwards when he is visibly ‘caught in his fangs’ like the king serpent,  . . . the sight is grander still. How could you doubt about this poem . . ..

At the moment of writing which, I receive your note. Do you receive my assurances from the deepest of my heart that I never did otherwise than ‘believe’ you  . . . never did nor shall do  . . . and that you completely misinterpreted my words if you drew another meaning from them. Believe me in this — will you? I could not believe you any more for anything you could say, now or hereafter — and so do not avenge yourself on my unwary sentences by remembering them against me for evil. I did not mean to vex you  . . . still less to suspect you — indeed I did not! and moreover it was quite your fault that I did not blot it out after it was written, whatever the meaning was. So you forgive me (altogether) for your own sins: you must: —

For my part, though I have been sorry since to have written you such a gloomy letter, the sorrow unmakes itself in hearing you speak so kindly. Your sympathy is precious to me, I may say. May God bless you. Write and tell me among the ‘indifferent things’ something not indifferent, how you are yourself, I mean  . . . for I fear you are not well and thought you were not looking so yesterday.

Dearest friend, I remain yours,

E.B.B.

 

Wednesday Morning,

August 27, 1845.

On the subject of your letter  – – quite irrespective of the injunction in it  – – I would not have dared speak; now, at least. But I may permit myself, perhaps, to say I am most grateful, most grateful, dearest friend, for this admission to participate, in my degree, in these feelings. There is a better thing than being happy in your happiness; I feel, now that you teach me, it is so. I will write no more now; though that sentence of ‘what you are expecting,  – – that I shall be tired of you &c.,’  – – though I could blot that out of your mind for ever by a very few words now,  – – for you would believe me at this moment, close on the other subject:  – – but I will take no such advantage  – – I will wait.

I have many things (indifferent things, after those) to say; will you write, if but a few lines, to change the associations for that purpose? Then I will write too.  – –

May God bless you,  – – in what is past and to come! I pray that from my heart, being yours

R.B.

 

Wednesday.

August 25, 1845.

But what have I done that you should ask what have you done? I have not brought any accusation, have I  . . . no, nor thought any, I am sure — and it was only the ‘kindness and considerateness’ — argument that was irresistible as a thing to be retorted, when your thanks came so naturally and just at the corner of an application. And then, you know, it is gravely true, seriously true, sadly true, that I am always expecting to hear or to see how tired you are at last of me! — sooner or later, you know! — But I did not mean any seriousness in that letter. No, nor did I mean  . . . (to pass to another question  . . .) to provoke you to the

Mister Hayley  . . . so are you . . ..

reply complimentary. All I observed concerning yourself, was the combination — which not an idiom in chivalry could treat grammatically as a thing common to me and you, inasmuch as everyone who has known me for half a day, may know that, if there is anything peculiar in me, it lies for the most part in an extraordinary deficiency in this and this and this,  . . . there is no need to describe what. Only nuns of the strictest sect of the nunneries are rather wiser in some points, and have led less restricted lives than I have in others. And if it had not been for my ‘carpet-work’ —

Well — and do you know that I have, for the last few years, taken quite to despise book-knowledge and its effect on the mind — I mean when people live by it as most readers by profession do,  . . . cloistering their souls under these roofs made with heads, when they might be under the sky. Such people grow dark and narrow and low, with all their pains.

Friday. — I was writing you see before you came — and now I go on in haste to speak ‘off my mind’ some things which are on it. First  . . . of yourself; how can it be that you are unwell again,  . . . and that you should talk (now did you not? — did I not hear you say so?) of being ‘weary in your soul’  . . . you? What should make you, dearest friend, weary in your soul; or out of spirits in any way? — Do  . . . tell me . . .. I was going to write without a pause — and almost I might, perhaps,  . . . even as one of the two hundred of your friends,  . . . almost I might say out that ‘Do tell me.’ Or is it (which I am inclined to think most probable) that you are tired of a same life and want change? It may happen to anyone sometimes, and is independent of your will and choice, you know — and I know, and the whole world knows: and would it not therefore be wise of you, in that case, to fold your life new again and go abroad at once? What can make you weary in your soul, is a problem to me. You are the last from whom I should have expected such a word. And you did say so, I think. I think that it was not a mistake of mine. And you,  . . . with a full liberty, and the world in your hand for every purpose and pleasure of it! — Or is it that, being unwell, your spirits are affected by that? But then you might be more unwell than you like to admit — . And I am teasing you with talking of it  . . . am I not? — and being disagreeable is only one third of the way towards being useful, it is good to remember in time.

And then the next thing to write off my mind is  . . . that you must not, you must not, make an unjust opinion out of what I said to-day. I have been uncomfortable since, lest you should — and perhaps it would have been better if I had not said it apart from all context in that way; only that you could not long be a friend of mine without knowing and seeing what so lies on the surface. But then,  . . . as far as I am concerned,  . . . no one cares less for a ‘will’ than I do (and this though I never had one,  . . . in clear opposition to your theory which holds generally nevertheless) for a will in the common things of life. Every now and then there must of course be a crossing and vexation — but in one’s mere pleasures and fantasies, one would rather be crossed and vexed a little than vex a person one loves  . . . and it is possible to get used to the harness and run easily in it at last; and there is a side-world to hide one’s thoughts in, and ‘carpet-work’ to be immoral on in spite of Mrs. Jameson,  . . . and the word ‘literature’ has, with me, covered a good deal of liberty as you must see  . . . real liberty which is never enquired into — and it has happened throughout my life by an accident (as far as anything is accident) that my own sense of right and happiness on any important point of overt action, has never run contrariwise to the way of obedience required of me  . . . while in things not exactly overt, I and all of us are apt to act sometimes up to the limit of our means of acting, with shut doors and windows, and no waiting for cognisance or permission. Ah — and that last is the worst of it all perhaps! to be forced into concealments from the heart naturally nearest to us; and forced away from the natural source of counsel and strength! — and then, the disingenuousness — the cowardice — the ‘vices of slaves’! — and everyone you see  . . . all my brothers,  . . . constrained bodily into submission  . . . apparent submission at least  . . . by that worst and most dishonouring of necessities, the necessity of living, everyone of them all, except myself, being dependent in money-matters on the inflexible will  . . . do you see? But what you do not see, what you cannot see, is the deep tender affection behind and below all those patriarchal ideas of governing grown up children ‘in the way they must go!’ and there never was (under the strata) a truer affection in a father’s heart  . . . no, nor a worthier heart in itself  . . . a heart loyaller and purer, and more compelling to gratitude and reverence, than his, as I see it! The evil is in the system — and he simply takes it to be his duty to rule, and to make happy according to his own views of the propriety of happiness — he takes it to be his duty to rule like the Kings of Christendom, by divine right. But he loves us through and through it — and I, for one, love him! and when, five years ago, I lost what I loved best in the world beyond comparison and rivalship  . . . far better than himself as he knew  . . . for everyone who knew me could not choose but know what was my first and chiefest affection  . . . when I lost that,  . . . I felt that he stood the nearest to me on the closed grave  . . . or by the unclosing sea  . . . I do not know which nor could ask. And I will tell you that not only he has been kind and patient and forbearing to me through the tedious trial of this illness (far more trying to standers by than you have an idea of perhaps) but that he was generous and forbearing in that hour of bitter trial, and never reproached me as he might have done and as my own soul has not spared — never once said to me then or since, that if it had not been for me, the crown of his house would not have fallen. He never did  . . . and he might have said it, and more — and I could have answered nothing. Nothing, except that I had paid my own price — and that the price I paid was greater than his loss  . . . his!! For see how it was; and how, ‘not with my hand but heart,’ I was the cause or occasion of that misery — and though not with the intention of my heart but with its weakness, yet the occasion, any way!

They sent me down you know to Torquay — Dr. Chambers saying that I could not live a winter in London. The worst — what people call the worst — was apprehended for me at that time. So I was sent down with my sister to my aunt there — and he, my brother whom I loved so, was sent too, to take us there and return. And when the time came for him to leave me, I, to whom he was the dearest of friends and brothers in one  . . . the only one of my family who  . . . well, but I cannot write of these things; and it is enough to tell you that he was above us all, better than us all, and kindest and noblest and dearest to me, beyond comparison, any comparison, as I said — and when the time came for him to leave me I, weakened by illness, could not master my spirits or drive back my tears — and my aunt kissed them away instead of reproving me as she should have done; and said that she would take care that I should not be grieved  . . . she!  . . . and so she sate down and wrote a letter to Papa to tell him that he would ‘break my heart’ if he persisted in calling away my brother — As if hearts were broken so! I have thought bitterly since that my heart did not break for a good deal more than that! And Papa’s answer was — burnt into me, as with fire, it is — that ‘under such circumstances he did not refuse to suspend his purpose, but that he considered it to be very wrong in me to exact such a thing.’ So there was no separation then: and month after month passed — and sometimes I was better and sometimes worse — and the medical men continued to say that they would not answer for my life  . . . they! if I were agitated — and so there was no more talk of a separation. And once he held my hand,  . . . how I remember! and said that he ‘loved me better than them all and that he would not leave me  . . . till I was well,’ he said! how I remember that! And ten days from that day the boat had left the shore which never returned; never — and he had left me! gone! For three days we waited — and I hoped while I could — oh — that awful agony of three days! And the sun shone as it shines to-day, and there was no more wind than now; and the sea under the windows was like this paper for smoothness — and my sisters drew the curtains back that I might see for myself how smooth the sea was, and how it could hurt nobody — and other boats came back one by one.

Remember how you wrote in your ‘Gismond’

and you never wrote anything which lived with me more than that. It is such a dreadful truth. But you knew it for truth, I hope, by your genius, and not by such proof as mine — I, who could not speak or shed a tear, but lay for weeks and months half conscious, half unconscious, with a wandering mind, and too near to God under the crushing of His hand, to pray at all. I expiated all my weak tears before, by not being able to shed then one tear — and yet they were forbearing — and no voice said ‘You have done this.’

Do not notice what I have written to you, my dearest friend. I have never said so much to a living being — I never could speak or write of it. I asked no question from the moment when my last hope went: and since then, it has been impossible for me to speak what was in me. I have borne to do it to-day and to you, but perhaps if you were to write — so do not let this be noticed between us again — do not! And besides there is no need! I do not reproach myself with such acrid thoughts as I had once — I know that I would have died ten times over for him, and that therefore though it was wrong of me to be weak, and I have suffered for it and shall learn by it I hope; remorse is not precisely the word for me — not at least in its full sense. Still you will comprehend from what I have told you how the spring of life must have seemed to break within me then; and how natural it has been for me to loathe the living on — and to lose faith (even without the loathing), to lose faith in myself  . . . which I have done on some points utterly. It is not from the cause of illness — no. And you will comprehend too that I have strong reasons for being grateful to the forbearance . . .. It would have been cruel, you think, to reproach me. Perhaps so! yet the kindness and patience of the desisting from reproach, are positive things all the same.

Shall I be too late for the post, I wonder? Wilson tells me that you were followed up-stairs yesterday (I write on Saturday this latter part) by somebody whom you probably took for my father. Which is Wilson’s idea — and I hope not yours. No — it was neither father nor other relative of mine, but an old friend in rather an ill temper.

And so good-bye until Tuesday. Perhaps I shall  . . . not  . . . hear from you to-night. Don’t let the tragedy or aught else do you harm — will you? and try not to be ‘weary in your soul’ any more — and forgive me this gloomy letter I half shrink from sending you, yet will send.

May God bless you.

E.B.B.

 

Thursday, 7 o’clock.

August 21, 1845.

I feel at home, this blue early morning, now that I sit down to write (or, speak, as I try and fancy) to you, after a whole day with those ‘other friends’  – – dear good souls, whom I should be so glad to serve, and to whom service must go by way of last will and testament, if a few more hours of ‘social joy,’ ‘kindly intercourse,’ &c., fall to my portion. My friend the Countess began proceedings (when I first saw her, not yesterday) by asking ‘if I had got as much money as I expected by any works published of late?’  – – to which I answered, of course, ‘exactly as much’  – – è grazioso! (All the same, if you were to ask her, or the like of her, ‘how much the stone-work of the Coliseum would fetch, properly burned down to lime?’  – – she would shudder from head to foot and call you ‘barbaro’ with good Trojan heart.) Now you suppose  – – (watch my rhetorical figure here)  – – you suppose I am going to congratulate myself on being so much for the better, en pays de connaissance, with my ‘other friend,’ E.B.B., number 2  – – or 200, why not?  – – whereas I mean to ‘fulmine over Greece,’ since thunder frightens you, for all the laurels,  – – and to have reason for your taking my own part and lot to yourself  – – I do, will, must, and will, again, wonder at you and admire you, and so on to the climax. It is a fixed, immovable thing: so fixed that I can well forego talking about it. But if to talk you once begin, ‘the King shall enjoy (or receive quietly) his own again’  – – I wear no bright weapon out of that Panoply  . . . or Panoplite, as I think you call Nonnus, nor ever, like Leigh Hunt’s ‘Johnny, ever blythe and bonny, went singing Nonny, nonny’ and see to-morrow, what a vengeance I will take for your ‘mere suspicion in that kind’! But to the serious matter  . . . nay, I said yesterday, I believe  – – keep off that Burgess  – – he is stark staring mad  – – mad, do you know? The last time I met him he told me he had recovered I forget how many of the lost books of Thucydides  – – found them imbedded in Suidas (I think), and had disengaged them from his Greek, without loss of a letter, ‘by an instinct he, Burgess, had’  – – (I spell his name wrongly to help the proper hiss at the end). Then, once on a time, he found in the ‘Christus Patiens,’ an odd dozen of lines, clearly dropped out of the ‘Prometheus,’ and proving that Æschylus was aware of the invention of gunpowder. He wanted to help Dr. Leonhard Schmitz in his ‘Museum’  – – and scared him, as Schmitz told me. What business has he, Burges, with English verse  – – and what on earth, or under it, has Miss Thomson to do with him. If she must displease one of two, why is Mr. B. not to be thanked and ‘sent to feed,’ as the French say prettily? At all events, do pray see what he has presumed to alter  . . . you can alter at sufficient warrant, profit by suggestion, I should think! But it is all Miss Thomson’s shame and fault: because she is quite in her propriety, saying to such intermeddlers, gently for the sake of their poor weak heads, ‘very good, I dare say, very desirable emendations, only the work is not mine, you know, but my friend’s, and you must no more alter it without her leave, than alter this sketch, this illustration, because you think you could mend Ariadne’s face or figure,  – – Fecit Tizianus, scripsit E.B.B.’ Dear friend, you will tell Miss Thomson to stop further proceedings, will you not? There! only, do mind what I say?

And now  – – till to-morrow! It seems an age since I saw you. I want to catch our first post  . . . (this phrase I ought to get stereotyped  – – I need it so constantly). The day is fine  . . . you will profit by it, I trust. ‘Flush, wag your tail and grow restless and scratch at the door!’

God bless you,  – – my one friend, without an ‘other’  – – bless you ever  – –

R.B.

 

Wednesday Morning.

August 20, 1845.

Mauvaise, mauvaise, mauvaise, you know as I know, just as much, that your ‘kindness and considerateness’ consisted, not in putting off Tuesday for another day, but in caring for my coming at all; for my coming and being told at the door that you were engaged, and I might call another time! And you are not, not my ‘other friend,’ any more than this head of mine is my other head, seeing that I have got a violin which has a head too! All which, beware lest you get fully told in the letter I will write this evening, when I have done with my Romans  – – who are, it so happens, here at this minute; that is, have left the house for a few minutes with my sister  – – but are not ‘with me,’ as you seem to understand it,  – – in the house to stay. They were kind to me in Rome, (husband and wife), and I am bound to be of what use I may during their short stay. Let me lose no time in begging and praying you to cry ‘hands off’ to that dreadful Burgess; have not I got a  . . . but I will tell you to-night  – – or on Friday which is my day, please  – – Friday. Till when, pray believe me, with respect and esteem,

Your most obliged and disobliged at these blank endings  – – what have I done? God bless you ever dearest friend.

 

Tuesday.

August 20, 1845.

I fancied it was just so — as I did not hear and did not see you on Monday. Not that you were expected particularly — but that you would have written your own negative, it appeared to me, by some post in the day, if you had received my note in time. It happened well too, altogether, as you have a friend with you, though Mr. Kenyon does not come, and will not come, I dare say; for he spoke like a doubter at the moment; and as this Tuesday wears on, I am not likely to have any visitors on it after all, and may as well, if the rain quite ceases, go and spend my solitude on the park a little. Flush wags his tail at that proposition when I speak it loud out. And I am to write to you before Friday, and so, am writing, you see  . . . which I should not, should not have done if I had not been told; because it is not my turn to write,  . . . did you think it was?

Not a word of Malta! except from Mr. Kenyon who talked homilies of it last Sunday and wanted to speak them to Papa — but it would not do in any way — now especially — and in a little time there will be a decision for or against; and I am afraid of both  . . . which is a happy state of preparation. Did I not tell you that early in the summer I did some translations for Miss Thomson’s ‘Classical Album,’ from Bion and Theocritus, and Nonnus the author of that large (not great) poem in some forty books of the ‘Dionysiaca’  . . . and the paraphrases from Apuleius? Well — I had a letter from her the other day, full of compunction and ejaculation, and declaring the fact that Mr. Burges had been correcting all the proofs of the poems; leaving out and emending generally, according to his own particular idea of the pattern in the mount — is it not amusing? I have been wicked enough to write in reply that it is happy for her and all readers  . . . sua si bona norint  . . . if during some half hour which otherwise might have been dedicated by Mr. Burges to patting out the lights of Sophocles and his peers, he was satisfied with the humbler devastation of E.B.B. upon Nonnus. You know it is impossible to help being amused. This correcting is a mania with that man! And then I, who wrote what I did from the ‘Dionysiaca,’ with no respect for ‘my author,’ and an arbitrary will to ‘put the case’ of Bacchus and Ariadne as well as I could, for the sake of the art-illustrations,  . . . those subjects Miss Thomson sent me,  . . . and did it all with full liberty and persuasion of soul that nobody would think it worth while to compare English with Greek and refer me back to Nonnus and detect my wanderings from the text!! But the critic was not to be cheated so! And I do not doubt that he has set me all ‘to rights’ from beginning to end; and combed Ariadne’s hair close to her cheeks for me. Have you known Nonnus,  . . . you who forget nothing? and have known everything, I think? For it is quite startling, I must tell you, quite startling and humiliating, to observe how you combine such large tracts of experience of outer and inner life, of books and men, of the world and the arts of it; curious knowledge as well as general knowledge  . . . and deep thinking as well as wide acquisition,  . . . and you, looking none the older for it all! — yes, and being besides a man of genius and working your faculty and not wasting yourself over a surface or away from an end. Dugald Stewart said that genius made naturally a lop-sided mind — did he not? He ought to have known you. And I who do  . . . a little  . . . (for I grow more loth than I was to assume the knowledge of you, my dear friend) — I do not mean to use that word ‘humiliation’ in the sense of having felt the thing myself in any painful way,  . . . because I never for a moment did, or could, you know, — never could  . . . never did  . . . except indeed when you have over praised me, which forced another personal feeling in. Otherwise it has always been quite pleasant to me to be ‘startled and humiliated’ — and more so perhaps than to be startled and exalted, if I might choose . . ..

Only I did not mean to write all this, though you told me to write to you. But the rain which keeps one in, gives one an example of pouring on  . . . and you must endure as you can or will. Also  . . . as you have a friend with you ‘from Italy’  . . . ‘from Rome,’ and commended me for my ‘kindness and considerateness’ in changing Tuesday to Friday  . . . (wasn’t it? . . .) shall I still be more considerate and put off the visit-day to next week? mind, you let it be as you like it best to be — I mean, as is most convenient ‘for the nonce’ to you and your friend — because all days are equal, as to that matter of convenience, to your other friend of this ilk,

E.B.B.