[Postmark: May 4, 1846]
When I said one more letter might come before to-morrow,
I forgot. How used I to manage in the early ‘ day
of small things ‘ — comparatively — when letters came once a
week at most, and yet I felt myself so rich, dearest !
I want you to remember, Ba, what I shall be nearly
sure to forget when closer to you than now ; tell me to-morrow.
If I chance to see Mrs. Jameson in the course of
the week what am I to say, — that is, what have you decided
on saying? Does she know that you write to me?
Because there is a point of simple good taste to be pre-
served . . I must not listen with indifference if I am told
that ‘ her friend Miss B.’ thought well of the last number.
But she must know we write, I think, — never make any
secret of that, when the subject is brought forward.
Here is warm May weather, my Ba ; I do not shiver by
sympathy as I fancy you going down-stairs. I shall hope
to see the sweet face look its . . now, what ? ‘ Best ‘ would
be altogether an impertinence, — unless you help my meaning,
which is ‘ best,’ too.
I received two days ago a number of the People’s
Journal — from our illustrious contemporary, Bennett!
Bennett figures where Barrett might have fronted the
world. Fact ! I will cut you out his very original lyric
— observe the felicitous emendation in the author’s own
blue ink . . that supplemental trochee makes a musical
line of it ! Mary Howitt follows with a pretty, washy, very
meritorious Lyric of Life. There is ‘ a guilty one ‘ — ‘ Name
her not ! ‘ ‘ Virtue turns aside for shame ‘
She was bom of guilty kin —
Her life’s course hath guilty been —
Unto school she never went —
And whate’er she learned was sin, —
Let Her Die !
And so on — what pure nonsense ! Who cries ‘ let her die ‘
in the whole world now ? thank God, nobody. The sin of
the world (of the lookers-on, not the causers of the wrong)
consists, in these days, in looking on and asking ‘ How can
we help her dying — or factory children’s dying — or evicted
Irish peasantry’s dying ? ‘ What ails these Howitts of a
sudden, that they purvey this kind of cat-lap, — they that
once did better ? William Howitt grinds here an article on
May day ; past human power of reading of course, but I
just noticed that not a venerablest commonplace was
excused on account of its age — the quotations from
Chaucer, Spenser, Herrick got once more into rank and
file with the affecting alacrity shown the other day at a
review of the Chelsea invalids ! Oh, William, ‘ Let them
die!’
So goodbye till to-morrow, my dearest. I love you and
bless you ever, and am your
R. B.