Saturday Evening.
This is the mere postscript to the letter I have just sent away. By a few minutes too late, comes what I have all day been waiting for, . . . and besides (now it is just too late!) now I may have a skein of silk if I please, to make that knot with, . . . for want of which, two locks meant for you, have been devoted to the infernal gods already . . . fallen into a tangle and thrown into the fire . . . and all the hair of my head might have followed, for I was losing my patience and temper fast, . . . and the post to boot. So wisely I shut my letter, (after unwisely having driven everything to the last moment!) — and now I have silk to tie fast with . . . to tie a ‘nodus’ . . . ‘dignus’ of the celestial interposition — and a new packet shall be ready to go to you directly.
At last I remember to tell you that the first letter you had from me this week, was forgotten, (not by me) forgotten, and detained, so, from the post — a piece of carelessness which Wilson came to confess to me too frankly for me to grumble as I should have done otherwise.
For the staying longer, I did not mean to say you were wrong not to stay. In the first place you were keeping your father ‘in a maze,’ as you said yourself — and then, even without that, I never know what o’clock it is . . . never. Mr. Kenyon tells me that I must live in a dream — which I do — time goes . . . seeming to go round rather than go forward. The watch I have, broke its spring two years ago, and there I leave it in the drawer — and the clocks all round strike out of hearing, or at best, when the wind brings the sound, one upon another in a confusion. So you know more of time than I do or can.
Till Monday then! I send the ‘Ricordi’ to take care of the rest . . . of mine. It is a touching story — and there is an impracticable nobleness from end to end in the spirit of it. How slow (to the ear and mind) that Italian rhetoric is! a language for dreamers and declaimers. Yet Dante made it for action, and Machiavelli’s prose can walk and strike as well as float and faint.
The ring is smaller than I feared at first, and may perhaps —
Now you will not say a word. My excuse is that you had nothing to remember me by, while I had this and this and this and this . . . how much too much!
If I could be too much
Your
E.B.B.