Day: June 9, 2018

[Postmark: June 9, 1846]

Tuesday.

Is your letter ‘ long,’ my own Ba? I seem to get to the
end, each time I read it, just as sorrowfully soon as usual –
so much for thankfulness ! But if Ba is not to be ‘tall,’
depend on it, her letter shall not describe itself as ‘ long’ –
though in a sense nothing ever written, ever read by me, drew
such a trail of light after it as her letters – your letters, my
own, own love ! While I write this, my lips rest on the
eglantine . . well, it shall be ‘ dog-rose ‘ for Flushie’s sake !
You say truly about the folly – it is very foolish, – when I
fancy you proposing to give me a golden Papal rose and gift
for a King, instead of this ! And if I feel this, why should
not you, and more vividly even ? A rose from Hampstead !
And you bore the journey well ? You should tell me,
precisely, detailedly.

As for Lough’s statues . . now, I have said more than I
meant if it deters you from going to see them ! If he will
abide strictly by his promise, there is much to reward the
trouble of going.

Always remember, my Ba, that the secret is your secret
and not mine . . that I keep it while you bid me, but that
you may communicate it to whom you please, when you
please, without waiting to apprize me. I should, I think,
have preferred telling Mrs. Jameson from the beginning
about the mere visits . . or, I don’t know . . by one such
piece of frankness you only expose yourself to, fifty new –
whatever they are ! For there would be so much the
more talk about you, and either the quick woman’s wit and
discernment are to be eluded, or they are not, – foiled or not –
and how manage without . . without those particular
evasions which seem to degrade most of all ? Miss Mitford’s
promises began the embarrassment. In short I think the
best way in such a case is to tell all or none. I believe you
might tell all to Mrs. Jameson with perfect safety, but,
for her sake, I doubt the propriety . . for it would be to
introduce her forthwith to exactly our own annoyances with
respect to Mr. Kenyon, Chorley &c. Once knowing, she
cannot un-know. In any case, I promise my conscience to
give her, – and anybody else that may have a right to it, – a
full explanation at the earliest safe moment . . may that be
at no great distance ! My own feeling is for telling Mr.
Kenyon . . though you would considerably startle me if you
answered ‘ well, do ! ‘ But, of the whole world, I seem only
to care for his not feeling aggrieved : oh, he will understand !
– and can, because he knows the circumstances at your house.
Come what will, I am sure of you ; ‘ if you live, and are
well ‘ – even this last clause I might exclude ; it has
often been in my thought to tell you . . only, dearest, there
is always, when I plan never so dreamily and vaguely,
always an understood submission the most absolute to your
own desire . . but I fancied, that, in the case of any real
obstacle arising so as to necessitate the ‘ postponement,’ &c.,
I should have stipulated . . in the right yourself have given
me . . I should have said – ‘ we will postpone it, if you will
marry me now . . merely as to the form . . but so as to
enable me, if difficulties should thicken, to be by your bed-
side at least.’ You see, what you want ‘ to relieve ‘ me of, is
just what my life should be thrice paid down for and cheaply.
How could you ever be so truly mine as so ? Even the poor
service does not ‘ part us ‘ before ‘ death ‘ – ‘ till sickness
do us part ! ‘

But there will be no sickness and all happiness, I trust
in God ! Dear, dear Ba, I love you wholly and for ever
true as I kiss your rose, and will keep it for ever. Bless you.

My first letter ‘ did not reach you by the first post on
Monday morning ‘ – No ! How should it . . when I carried
it to town on Sunday night and went half a mile out of my
way to put it in the general post office at the corner of
Oxford Street !

You know I am to breakfast with Mrs. Jameson to-mor-
row and perhaps I may make some calls after : if anything
keeps me in Town so as to hinder the letter by the 8 o’clock-
post, you will know the reason . . and expect the letter the
next morning ; but I will endeavour to get back in time.

[Postmark: June 9, 1846]

Monday Morning.

The stars threaten you with a long letter to-day, it seems,
for I stretch out my hand and take blindly the largest sheet.
Dearest, I have been driving out before your letter came . .
and to Hampstead! think of that. And see the proof of
it – this grew in the hedges when the sun rose to-day. We
had a great branch gathered, and ‘this was of it,’ starred
over with dog-roses. I did in the morning long for air,
through the suffocation yesterday, and the walking being
better for another day, my sisters persuaded me into the
carriage. Only I wanted to wait for your letter, my letter,
and could not – it did not come by the usual early post, and
the carriage was here before it . . so I had to go, thinking
of it all the way, and having it on my return ready to
gladden me. How you make me laugh with your phreno-
logist ! ‘For the interests of science’ you should have
given your name. Then, would have come the whole history
in the next lecture, . . how ‘Once in an omnibus he met
an individual with a forehead and eyes of mark, and knew
him at a glance for the first poet of the age.’ It would
have made a feature in the lecture, and highly developed, I
dare say, . . to suit the features in the omnibus. Just at
the moment of this observation I too was thinking of eyes
‘calm eyes’ did I say ? Yes, calm, serene . . which was
what struck me first of all, in the look of them was it ever
observed before, I wonder? The most serene spiritual eyes,
I ever saw – I thought that the first day I saw you. They
may be called by other names beside, but they shall not
lose the name I then gave them. Now to bear with the
horrible portrait in the matter of the eyes, is a hard thing –
Mr. Howitt must have his shut nearly, I think. The hair is
like – and nothing else. The mouth, the form of the cheek,
one is as unlike as the other. And the character of the
whole is most unlike of the whole – it is a vulgarized
caricature and I only wonder how I could have fastened
it inside of my ‘ Paracelsus ‘ frontispiece-fashion. When it
was hung up and framed, I did not know you face to face,
remember. Mr, Kenyon told me it was ‘ rather like.’ But
always and uninstructed I seemed to know that it was not
like you in some things . .

Monday Evening.

Observe how the sentence breaks off!
While I was writing it, came a ‘ tapping, tapping at the cham-
ber door,’ as sings my dedicator Edgar Poe. Flush barked
vociferously ; I threw down the pen and shut up the writing
case, . . and lo, Mrs. Jameson ! I suppose she did not
guess that I was writing to you. She brought me the
engravings of Xanthian marbles, and also her new essays
. . and was very kind as usual, and proposed to come some
day next week with a carriage to take me out, and all this
time, how we treat her ! Will she not have a right to com-
plain of being denied the degree of confidence we gave
(. . Mr. Kenyon gave for me . .) to Miss Bayley? Will
she not think hereafter ‘There was no need of their
deceiving me ? ‘ And yet I doubt how to retreat now.
Could I possibly say to her the next time she speaks of you
. . or could I not ? it would set her on suspecting perhaps.
She talked a little to-day of Italy, and plainly asked me what
thoughts I had of it, – to which I could answer truthfully
‘ No thoughts, but dreams.’ Then she insisted, ‘ But
whenever you have thoughts, you will let me know them ?
You will not be in Italy when I am there, without my
knowing it ? And where will you go – ? to Pisa ? . . to
Sienna ? to Naples ? ‘ And she advised . . ‘ Don’t go where
the English are, in any case.’ And encouraged like an
oracle, . . ‘ Remember that where there’s a will there’s a
way ‘ knowing no more what she spoke, than a Pythian on
the serpent’s skin.

Beloved, you are right in your fear about Mr. Lough.
I have decided not to go there. Oh, it is best certainly ;
and, quietly considered, I shall be happier as well as safer
in not going. We must walk softly on the snowdrifts of the
world, now that we have got to them.

For the rest, . . that is for the chief thing . . you wrote
foolishly in your first letter to-day, my beloved, – you can
write foolishly on occasion, let me grant to the critics. I
have just so much logic as to be able to see (though I am a
woman) that for me to be too good for you, and for you to
be too good for me, cannot be true at once, both ways.
Now I could discern and prove, from the beginning of the
beginning, that you were too good for me – it is too late
therefore to take up the other argument – the handle of it
was broken last year.

Also, I do not go to the world to ask it to appraise you
I would fain leave to Robins the things of Robins. I
hope you have repented all day to-day having written so
foolishly yesterday. Even Robins would not justify you.

Dearest, the avalanches are on us ! Uncle and aunts
coming down in a great crash ! My uncle Hedley comes
next week ! – on the second or third of July, the eldest of
my aunts, . . from Paris, . . who proposes to reside in
this house for a week it may be longer ! and, still in July,
the rest of the Hedleys, I think ! – everybody coming,
coming ! Their welcome will be somewhat of a ghastly
smile from me – for indeed I cannot be quite delighted, after
the fashion of a thoroughly dutiful niece.

Ah, never mind them ! Nobody can change anything,
if you do not change yourself. You have ‘ a right ‘ . . not
the ‘ shadow ‘ of one, but the very right . . to all I am, and
to all the life I live. Did you not see before, what I have
felt so long, that indeed you have a right to me and over
me?

I am your own

BA.