Author: RB

Wednesday.

January 28, 1846.

Ever dearest  – – I will say, as you desire, nothing on that subject  – – but this strictly for myself: you engaged me to consult my own good in the keeping or breaking our engagement; not your good as it might even seem to me; much less seem to another. My only good in this world  – – that against which all the world goes for nothing  – – is to spend my life with you, and be yours. You know that when I claim anything, it is really yourself in me  – – you give me a right and bid me use it, and I, in fact, am most obeying you when I appear most exacting on my own account  – – so, in that feeling, I dare claim, once for all, and in all possible cases (except that dreadful one of your becoming worse again  . . . in which case I wait till life ends with both of us), I claim your promise’s fulfilment  – – say, at the summer’s end: it cannot be for your good that this state of things should continue. We can go to Italy for a year or two and be happy as day and night are long. For me, I adore you. This is all unnecessary, I feel as I write: but you will think of the main fact as ordained, granted by God, will you not, dearest?  – – so, not to be put in doubt ever again  – – then, we can go quietly thinking of after matters. Till to-morrow, and ever after, God bless my heart’s own, own Ba. All my soul follows you, love  – – encircles you  – – and I live in being yours.

 

Tuesday.

January 27, 1846.

Why will you give me such unnecessary proofs of your goodness? Why not leave the books for me to take away, at all events? No  – – you must fold up, and tie round, and seal over, and be at all the pains in the world with those hands I see now. But you only threaten; say you ‘shall send’  – – as yet, and nothing having come, I do pray you, if not too late, to save me the shame  – – add to the gratitude you never can now, I think  . . . only think, for you are a siren, and I don’t know certainly to what your magic may not extend. Thus, in not so important a matter, I should have said, the day before yesterday, that no letter from you could make my heart rise within me, more than of old  . . . unless it should happen to be of twice the ordinary thickness  . . . and then there’s a fear at first lest the over-running of my dealt-out measure should be just a note of Mr. Kenyon’s, for instance! But yesterday the very seal began with ‘Ba’  – – Now, always seal with that seal my letters, dearest! Do you recollect Donne’s pretty lines about seals?

And in his own English,

(By the way, what a mercy that he never noticed the jingle in posse of ending ‘expressions’ and beginning ‘impressions.’)

How your account of the actors in the ‘Love’s Labour Lost’ amused me! I rather like, though, the notion of that steady, business-like pursuit of love under difficulties; and the sobbing proves something surely! Serjt. Talfourd says  – – is it not he who says it?  – – ‘All tears are not for sorrow.’ I should incline to say, from my own feeling, that no tears were. They only express joy in me, or sympathy with joy  – – and so is it with you too, I should think.

Understand that I do not disbelieve in Mesmerism  – – I only object to insufficient evidence being put forward as quite irrefragable. I keep an open sense on the subject  – – ready to be instructed; and should have refused such testimony as Miss Martineau’s if it had been adduced in support of something I firmly believed  – – ‘non tali auxilio’  – – indeed, so has truth been harmed, and only so, from the beginning. So, I shall read what you bid me, and learn all I can.

I am not quite so well this week  – – yesterday some friends came early and kept me at home  – – for which I seem to suffer a little; less, already, than in the morning  – – so I will go out and walk away the whirring  . . . which is all the mighty ailment. As for ‘Luria’ I have not looked at it since I saw you  – – which means, saw you in the body, because last night I saw you; as I wonder if you know!

Thursday, and again I am with you  – – and you will forget nothing  . . . how the farewell is to be returned? Ah, my dearest, sweetest Ba; how entirely I love you!

May God bless you ever  – –

R.

2. p.m. Your parcel arrives  . . . the penholder; now what shall I say? How am I to use so fine a thing even in writing to you? I will give it you again in our Isle, and meantime keep it where my other treasures are  – – my letters and my dear ringlet.

Thank you  – – all I can thank.

 

Sunday Evening.

January 26, 1846.

I will not try and write much to-night, dearest, for my head gives a little warning  – – and I have so much to think of!  – – spite of my penholder being kept back from me after all! Now, ought I to have asked for it? Or did I not seem grateful enough at the promise? This last would be a characteristic reason, seeing that I reproached myself with feeling too grateful for the ‘special symbol’  – – the ‘essential meaning’ of which was already in my soul. Well then, I will  – – I do pray for it  – – next time; and I will keep it for that one yesterday and all its memories  – – and it shall bear witness against me, if, on the Siren’s isle, I grow forgetful of Wimpole Street. And when is ‘next time’ to be  – – Wednesday or Thursday? When I look back on the strangely steady widening of my horizon  – – how no least interruption has occurred to visits or letters  – – oh, care you, sweet  – – care for us both!

That remark of your sister’s delights me  – – you remember?  – – that the anger would not be so formidable. I have exactly the fear of encountering that, which the sense of having to deal with a ghost would induce: there’s no striking at it with one’s partizan. Well, God is above all! It is not my fault if it so happens that by returning my love you make me exquisitely blessed; I believe  – – more than hope, I am sure I should do all I ever now can do, if you were never to know it  – – that is, my love for you was in the first instance its own reward  – – if one must use such phrases  – – and if it were possible for that  . . . not anger, which is of no good, but that opposition  – – that adverse will  – – to show that your good would be attained by the  – –

But it would need to be shown to me. You have said thus to me  – – in the very last letter, indeed. But with me, or any man, the instincts of happiness develop themselves too unmistakably where there is anything like a freedom of will. The man whose heart is set on being rich or influential after the worldly fashion, may be found far enough from the attainment of either riches or influence  – – but he will be in the presumed way to them  – – pumping at the pump, if he is really anxious for water, even though the pump be dry  – – but not sitting still by the dusty roadside.

I believe  – – first of all, you  – – but when that is done, and I am allowed to call your heart mine,  – – I cannot think you would be happy if parted from me  – – and that belief, coming to add to my own feeling in that case. So, this will be  – – I trust in God.

In life, in death, I am your own, my own! My head has got well already! It is so slight a thing, that I make such an ado about! Do not reply to these bodings  – – they are gone  – – they seem absurd! All steps secured but the last, and that last the easiest! Yes  – – far easiest! For first you had to be created, only that; and then, in my time; and then, not in Timbuctoo but Wimpole Street, and then  . . . the strange hedge round the sleeping Palace keeping the world off  – – and then  . . . all was to begin, all the difficulty only begin:  – – and now  . . . see where is reached! And I kiss you, and bless you, my dearest, in earnest of the end!

 

January 23, 1846.

Now, of all perverse interpretations that ever were and never ought to have been, commend me to this of Ba’s  – – after I bade her generosity ‘understand me,’ too!  – – which meant, ‘let her pick out of my disjointed sentences a general meaning, if she can,  – – which I very well know their imperfect utterance would not give to one unsupplied with the key of my whole heart’s-mystery’  – – and Ba, with the key in her hand, to pretend and poke feathers and penholders into the key-hole, and complain that the wards are wrong! So  – – when the poor scholar, one has read of, uses not very dissimilar language and argument  – – who being threatened with the deprivation of his Virgil learnt the Æneid by heart and then said ‘Take what you can now’!  – – that Ba calls ‘feeling the loss would not be so hard after all’!  – – I do not, at least. And if at any future moment I should again be visited  – – as I earnestly desire may never be the case  – – with a sudden consciousness of the entire inutility of all earthly love (since of my love) to hold its object back from the decree of God, if such should call it away; one of those known facts which, for practical good, we treat as supremely common-place, but which, like those of the uncertainty of life  – – the very existence of God, I may say  – – if they were not common-place, and could they be thoroughly apprehended (except in the chance minutes which make one grow old, not the mere years)  – – the business of the world would cease; but when you find Chaucer’s graver at his work of ‘graving smale seles’ by the sun’s light, you know that the sun’s self could not have been created on that day  – – do you ‘understand’ that, Ba? And when I am with you, or here or writing or walking  – – and perfectly happy in the sunshine of you, I very well know I am no wiser than is good for me and that there seems no harm in feeling it impossible this should change, or fail to go on increasing till this world ends and we are safe, I with you, for ever. But when  – – if only once, as I told you, recording it for its very strangeness, I do feel  – – in a flash  – – that words are words, and could not alter that decree  . . . will you tell me how, after all, that conviction and the true woe of it are better met than by the as thorough conviction that, for one blessing, the extreme woe is impossible now  – – that you are, and have been, mine, and me  – – one with me, never to be parted  – – so that the complete separation not being to be thought of, such an incomplete one as is yet in Fate’s power may be the less likely to attract her notice? And, dearest, in all emergencies, see, I go to you for help; for your gift of better comfort than is found in myself. Or ought I, if I could, to add one more proof to the Greek proverb ‘that the half is greater than the whole’  – – and only love you for myself (it is absurd; but if I could disentwine you from my soul in that sense), only see my own will, and good (not in your will and good, as I now see them and shall ever see)  . . . should you say I did love you then? Perhaps. And it would have been better for me, I know  – – I should not have written this or the like  – – there being no post in the Siren’s isle, as you will see.

And the end of the whole matter is  – – what? Not by any means what my Ba expects or ought to expect; that I say with a flounce ‘Catch me blotting down on paper, again, the first vague impressions in the weakest words and being sure I have only to bid her “understand”!  – – when I can get “Blair on Rhetoric,” and the additional chapter on the proper conduct of a letter’! On the contrary I tell you, Ba, my own heart’s dearest, I will provoke you tenfold worse; will tell you all that comes uppermost, and what frightens me or reassures me, in moments lucid or opaque  – – and when all the pen-stumps and holders refuse to open the lock, out will come the key perforce; and once put that knowledge  – – of the entire love and worship of my heart and soul  – – to its proper use, and all will be clear  – – tell me to-morrow that it will be clear when I call you to account and exact strict payment for every word and phrase and full-stop and partial stop, and no stop at all, in this wicked little note which got so treacherously the kisses and the thankfulness  – – written with no penholder that is to belong to me, I hope  – – but with the feather, possibly, which Sycorax wiped the dew from, as Caliban remembered when he was angry! All but  – – (that is, all was wrong but)  – – to be just  . . . the old, dear, so dear ending which makes my heart beat now as at first  . . . and so, pays for all! Wherefore, all is right again, is it not? and you are my own priceless Ba, my very own  – – and I will have you, if you like that style, and want you, and must have you every day and all day long  – – much less see you to-morrow stand  – –

. . . Now, there breaks down my new spirit  – – and, shame or no, I must pray you, in the old way, not to receive me standing  – – I should not remain master of myself I do believe!

You have put out of my head all I intended to write  – – and now I slowly begin to remember the matters they seem strangely unimportant  – – that poor impotency of a Newspaper! No  – – nothing of that for the present. To-morrow my dearest! Ba’s first comment  – – ‘To-morrow? To-day is too soon, it seems  – – yet it is wise, perhaps, to avoid the satiety &c. &c. &c. &c. &c.’

Does she feel how I kissed that comment back on her dear self as fit punishment?

 

Thursday Morning.

January 22, 1846.

But you did not get the letter last evening  – – no, for all my good intentions  – – because somebody came over in the morning and forced me to go out  . . . and, perhaps, I knew what was coming, and had all my thoughts there, that is, here now, with my own letters from you. I think so  – – for this punishment, I will tell you, came for some sin or other last night. I woke  – – late, or early  – – and, in one of those lucid moments when all things are thoroughly perceived,  – – whether suggested by some forgotten passage in the past sleep itself, I don’t know  – – but I seem to apprehend, comprehend entirely, for the first time, what would happen if I lost you  – – the whole sense of that closed door of Catarina’s came on me at once, and it was I who said  – – not as quoting or adapting another’s words, but spontaneously, unavoidably, ‘In that door, you will not enter, I have‘ . . .. And, dearest, the

Unwritten it must remain.

What is on the other leaf, no ill-omen, after all,  – – because I strengthened myself against a merely imaginary evil  – – as I do always; and thus  – – I know I never can lose you,  – – you surely are more mine, there is less for the future to give or take away than in the ordinary cases, where so much less is known, explained, possessed, as with us. Understand for me, my dearest  – –

And do you think, sweet, that there is any free movement of my soul which your penholder is to secure? Well, try,  – – it will be yours by every right of discovery  – – and I, for my part, will religiously report to you the first time I think of you ‘which, but for your present I should not have done’  – – or is it not a happy, most happy way of ensuring a better fifth act to Luria than the foregoing? See the absurdity I write  – – when it will be more probably the ruin of the whole  – – for was it not observed in the case of a friend of mine once, who wrote his own part in a piece for private theatricals, and had ends of his own to serve in it,  – – that he set to work somewhat after this fashion: ‘Scene 1st. A breakfast chamber  – – Lord and Lady A. at table  – – Lady A./ No more coffee my dear?  – – Lord A./ One more cup! (Embracing her). Lady A./ I was thinking of trying the ponies in the Park  – – are you engaged? Lord A./ Why, there’s that bore of a Committee at the House till 2. (Kissing her hand).’ And so forth, to the astonishment of the auditory, who did not exactly see the ‘sequitur’ in either instance. Well, dearest, whatever comes of it, the ‘aside,’ the bye-play, the digression, will be the best, and only true business of the piece. And though I must smile at your notion of securing that by any fresh appliance, mechanical or spiritual, yet I do thank you, dearest, thank you from my heart indeed  – – (and I write with Bramahs always  – – not being able to make a pen!)

If you have gone so far with ‘Luria,’ I fancy myself nearly or altogether safe. I must not tell you, but I wished just these feelings to be in your mind about Domizia, and the death of Luria: the last act throws light back on all, I hope. Observe only, that Luria would stand, if I have plied him effectually with adverse influences, in such a position as to render any other end impossible without the hurt to Florence which his religion is, to avoid inflicting  – – passively awaiting, for instance, the sentence and punishment to come at night, would as surely inflict it as taking part with her foes. His aim is to prevent the harm she will do herself by striking him, so he moves aside from the blow. But I know there is very much to improve and heighten in this fourth act, as in the others  – – but the right aspect of things seems obtained and the rest of the work is plain and easy.

I am obliged to leave off  – – the rest to-morrow  – – and then dear, Saturday! I love you utterly, my own best, dearest  – –

 

Monday Morning.

January 19, 1846.

Love, if you knew but how vexed I was, so very few minutes after my note left last night; how angry with the unnecessary harshness into which some of the phrases might be construed  – – you would forgive me, indeed. But, when all is confessed and forgiven, the fact remains  – – that it would be the one trial I know I should not be able to bear; the repetition of these ‘scenes’  – – intolerable  – – not to be written of, even my mind refuses to form a clear conception of them.

My own loved letter is come  – – and the news; of which the reassuring postscript lets the interrupted joy flow on again. Well, and I am not to be grateful for that; nor that you do ‘eat your dinner’? Indeed you will be ingenious to prevent me! I fancy myself meeting you on ‘the stairs’  – – stairs and passages generally, and galleries (ah, thou indeed!) all, with their picturesque accidents, of landing-places, and spiral heights and depths, and sudden turns and visions of half open doors into what Quarles calls ‘mollitious chambers’  – – and above all, landing-places  – – they are my heart’s delight  – – I would come upon you unaware in a landing-place in my next dream! One day we may walk on the galleries round and over the inner court of the Doges’ Palace at Venice; and read, on tablets against the wall, how such an one was banished for an ‘enormous dig (intacco) into the public treasure’  – – another for  . . . what you are not to know because his friends have got chisels and chipped away the record of it  – – underneath the ‘giants’ on their stands, and in the midst of the cortile the bronze fountains whence the girls draw water.

So you too wrote French verses?  – – Mine were of less lofty argument  – – one couplet makes me laugh now for the reason of its false quantity  – – I translated the Ode of Alcæus; and the last couplet ran thus . . ..

The fact was, I could not bear to hurt my French Master’s feelings  – – who inveterately maltreated ‘ai’s and oi’s’ and in this instance, an ‘ei.’ But ‘Pauline’ is altogether of a different sort of precocity  – – you shall see it when I can master resolution to transcribe the explanation which I know is on the fly-leaf of a copy here. Of that work, the Athenæum said [several words erased] now, what outrageous folly! I care, and you care, precisely nothing about its sayings and doings  – – yet here I talk!

Now to you  – – Ba! When I go through sweetness to sweetness, at ‘Ba’ I stop last of all, and lie and rest. That is the quintessence of them all,  – – they all take colour and flavour from that. So, dear, dear Ba, be glad as you can to see me to-morrow. God knows how I embalm every such day,  – – I do not believe that one of the forty is confounded with another in my memory. So, that is gained and sure for ever. And of letters, this makes my 104th and, like Donne’s Bride,

Bless you, my own Beloved!

I am much better to-day  – – having been not so well yesterday  – – whence the note to you, perhaps! I put that to your charity for construction. By the way, let the foolish and needless story about my whilome friend be of this use, that it records one of the traits in that same generous love, of me, I once mentioned, I remember  – – one of the points in his character which, I told you, would account, if you heard them, for my parting company with a good deal of warmth of attachment to myself.

What a day! But you do not so much care for rain, I think. My Mother is no worse, but still suffering sadly.

Ever your own, dearest ever  – –

 

Sunday Evening.

January 19, 1846.

You may have seen, I put off all the weighty business part of the letter  – – but I shall do very little with it now. To be sure, a few words will serve, because you understand me, and believe in enough of me. First, then, I am wholly satisfied, thoroughly made happy in your assurance. I would build up an infinity of lives, if I could plan them, one on the other, and all resting on you, on your word  – – I fully believe in it,  – – of my feeling, the gratitude, let there be no attempt to speak. And for ‘waiting’; ‘not hurrying’,  – – I leave all with you henceforth  – – all you say is most wise, most convincing.

On the saddest part of all,  – – silence. You understand, and I can understand through you. Do you know, that I never used to dream unless indisposed, and rarely then  – – (of late I dream of you, but quite of late)  – – and those nightmare dreams have invariably been of one sort. I stand by (powerless to interpose by a word even) and see the infliction of tyranny on the unresisting man or beast (generally the last)  – – and I wake just in time not to die: let no one try this kind of experiment on me or mine! Though I have observed that by a felicitous arrangement, the man with the whip puts it into use with an old horse commonly. I once knew a fine specimen of the boilingly passionate, desperately respectable on the Eastern principle that reverences a madman  – – and this fellow, whom it was to be death to oppose, (some bloodvessel was to break)  – – he, once at a dinner party at which I was present, insulted his wife (a young pretty simple believer in his awful immunities from the ordinary terms that keep men in order)  – – brought the tears into her eyes and sent her from the room  . . . purely to ‘show off’ in the eyes of his guests  . . . (all males, law-friends &c., he being a lawyer.) This feat accomplished, he, too, left us with an affectation of compensating relentment, to ‘just say a word and return’  – – and no sooner was his back to the door than the biggest, stupidest of the company began to remark ‘what a fortunate thing it was that Mr. So-and-so had such a submissive wife  – – not one of the women who would resist  – – that is, attempt to resist  – – and so exasperate our gentleman into  . . . Heaven only knew what!’ I said it was, in one sense, a fortunate thing; because one of these women, without necessarily being the lion-tressed Bellona, would richly give him his desert, I thought  – – ‘Oh, indeed?’ No  – – this man was not to be opposed  – – wait, you might, till the fit was over, and then try what kind argument would do  – – and so forth to unspeakable nausea. Presently we went up-stairs  – – there sate the wife with dried eyes, and a smile at the tea-table  – – and by her, in all the pride of conquest, with her hand in his, our friend  – – disposed to be very good-natured of course. I listened arrectis auribus, and in a minute he said he did not know somebody I mentioned. I told him, that I easily conceived  – – such a person would never condescend to know him, &c., and treated him to every consequence ingenuity could draw from that text  – – and at the end marched out of the room; and the valorous man, who had sate like a post, got up, took a candle, followed me to the door, and only said in unfeigned wonder, ‘What can have possessed you, my dear B?’  – – All which I as much expected beforehand, as that the above mentioned man of the whip keeps quiet in the presence of an ordinary-couraged dog. All this is quite irrelevant to the case  – – indeed, I write to get rid of the thought altogether. But I do hold it the most stringent duty of all who can, to stop a condition, a relation of one human being to another which God never allowed to exist between Him and ourselves. Trees live and die, if you please, and accept will for a law  – – but with us, all commands surely refer to a previously-implanted conviction in ourselves of their rationality and justice. Or why declare that ‘the Lord is holy, just and good’ unless there is recognised and independent conception of holiness and goodness, to which the subsequent assertion is referable? ‘You know what holiness is, what it is to be good? Then, He is that’  – – not, ‘that is so  – – because he is that’; though, of course, when once the converse is demonstrated, this, too, follows, and may be urged for practical purposes. All God’s urgency, so to speak, is on the justice of his judgments, rightness of his rule: yet why? one might ask  – – if one does believe that the rule is his; why ask further?  – – Because, his is a ‘reasonable service,’ once for all.

Understand why I turn my thoughts in this direction. If it is indeed as you fear, and no endeavour, concession, on my part will avail, under any circumstances  – – (and by endeavour, I mean all heart and soul could bring the flesh to perform)  – – in that case, you will not come to me with a shadow past hope of chasing.

The likelihood is, I over frighten myself for you, by the involuntary contrast with those here  – – you allude to them  – – if I went with this letter downstairs and said simply ‘I want this taken to the direction to-night, and am unwell and unable to go, will you take it now?’ my father would not say a word, or rather would say a dozen cheerful absurdities about his ‘wanting a walk,’ ‘just having been wishing to go out’ &c. At night he sits studying my works  – – illustrating them (I will bring you drawings to make you laugh)  – – and yesterday I picked up a crumpled bit of paper  . . . ‘his notion of what a criticism on this last number ought to be,  – – none, that have appeared, satisfying him!’  – – So judge of what he will say! And my mother loves me just as much more as must of necessity be.

Once more, understand all this  . . . for the clock scares me of a sudden  – – I meant to say more  – – far more.

But may God bless you ever  – – my own dearest, my Ba  – –

I am wholly your R.

(Tuesday)

 

Saturday.

January 17, 1846.

Did my own Ba, in the prosecution of her studies, get to a book on the forb  – – no, unforbidden shelf  – – wherein Voltaire pleases to say that ‘si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer’? I feel, after reading these letters,  – – as ordinarily after seeing you, sweetest, or hearing from you,  – – that if marriage did not exist, I should infallibly invent it. I should say, no words, no feelings even, do justice to the whole conviction and religion of my soul  – – and though they may be suffered to represent some one minute’s phase of it, yet, in their very fulness and passion they do injustice to the unrepresented, other minute’s, depth and breadth of love  . . . which let my whole life (I would say) be devoted to telling and proving and exemplifying, if not in one, then in another way  – – let me have the plain palpable power of this; the assured time for this  . . . something of the satisfaction  . . . (but for the fantasticalness of the illustration)  . . . something like the earnestness of some suitor in Chancery if he could once get Lord Lyndhurst into a room with him, and lock the door on them both, and know that his whole story must be listened to now, and the ‘rights of it,’  – – dearest, the love unspoken now you are to hear ‘in all time of our tribulation, in all time of our wealth  . . . at the hour of death, and’  – –

If I did not know this was so,  – – nothing would have been said, or sought for. Your friendship, the perfect pride in it, the wish for, and eager co-operation in, your welfare, all that is different, and, seen now, nothing.

I will care for it no more, dearest  – – I am wedded to you now. I believe no human being could love you more  – – that thought consoles me for my own imperfection  – – for when that does strike me, as so often it will, I turn round on my pursuing self, and ask ‘What if it were a claim then, what is in Her, demanded rationally, equitably, in return for what were in you  – – do you like that way!’  – – And I do not, Ba  – – you, even, might not  – – when people everyday buy improveable ground, and eligible sites for building, and don’t want every inch filled up, covered over, done to their hands! So take me, and make me what you can and will  – – and though never to be more yours, yet more like you, I may and must be  – – Yes, indeed  – – best, only love!

And am I not grateful to your sisters  – – entirely grateful for that crowning comfort; it is ‘miraculous,’ too, if you please  – – for you shall know me by finger-tip intelligence or any art magic of old or new times  – – but they do not see me, know me  – – and must moreover be jealous of you, chary of you, as the daughters of Hesperus, of wonderers and wistful lookers up at the gold apple  – – yet instead of ‘rapidly levelling eager eyes’  – – they are indulgent? Then  – – shall I wish capriciously they were not your sisters, not so near you, that there might be a kind of grace in loving them for it’  – – but what grace can there be when  . . . yes, I will tell you  – – no, I will not  – – it is foolish!  – – and it is not foolish in me to love the table and chairs and vases in your room.

Let me finish writing to-morrow; it would not become me to utter a word against the arrangement  – – and Saturday promised, too  – – but though all concludes against the early hour on Monday, yet  – – but this is wrong  – – on Tuesday it shall be, then,  – – thank you, dearest! you let me keep up the old proper form, do you not?  – – I shall continue to thank, and be gratified &c. as if I had some untouched fund of thanks at my disposal to cut a generous figure with on occasion! And so, now, for your kind considerateness thank you  . . . that I say, which, God knows, could not say, if I died ten deaths in one to do you good, ‘you are repaid’  – –

To-morrow I will write, and answer more. I am pretty well, and will go out to-day  – – to-night. My Act is done, and copied  – – I will bring it. Do you see the Athenæum? By Chorley surely  – – and kind and satisfactory. I did not expect any notice for a long time  – – all that about the ‘mist,’ ‘unchanged manner’ and the like is politic concession to the Powers that Be  . . . because he might tell me that and much more with his own lips or unprofessional pen, and be thanked into the bargain, yet he does not. But I fancy he saves me from a rougher hand  – – the long extracts answer every purpose  – –

There is all to say yet  – – to-morrow!

And ever, ever your own; God bless you!

R.

Admire the clean paper . . .. I did not notice that I have been writing in a desk where a candle fell! See the bottoms of the other pages!

 

Thursday.

January 15, 1846.

Dearest, dearer to my heart minute by minute, I had no wish to give you pain, God knows. No one can more readily consent to let a few years more or less of life go out of account,  – – be lost  – – but as I sate by you, you so full of the truest life, for this world as for the next,  – – and was struck by the possibility, all that might happen were I away, in the case of your continuing to acquiesce  – – dearest, it is horrible  – – could not but speak. If in drawing you, all of you, closer to my heart, I hurt you whom I would  – – outlive  . . . yes,  – – cannot speak here  – – forgive me, Ba.

My Ba, you are to consider now for me. Your health, your strength, it is all wonderful; that is not my dream, you know  – – but what all see. Now, steadily care for us both  – – take time, take counsel if you choose; but at the end tell me what you will do for your part  – – thinking of me as utterly devoted, soul and body, to you, living wholly in your life, seeing good and ill only as you see,  – – being yours as your hand is,  – – or as your Flush, rather. Then I will, on my side, prepare. When I say ‘take counsel’  – – I reserve my last right, the man’s right of first speech. I stipulate, too, and require to say my own speech in my own words or by letter  – – remember! But this living without you is too tormenting now. So begin thinking,  – – as for Spring, as for a New Year, as for a new life.

I went no farther than the door with Mr. Kenyon. He must see the truth; and  – – you heard the playful words which had a meaning all the same.

No more of this; only, think of it for me, love!

One of these days I shall write a long letter  – – on the omitted matters, unanswered questions, in your past letters. The present joy still makes me ungrateful to the previous one; but I remember. We are to live together one day, love!

Will you let Mr. Poe’s book lie on the table on Monday, if you please, that I may read what he does say, with my own eyes? That I meant to ask, too!

How too, too kind you are  – – how you care for so little that affects me! I am very much better  – – I went out yesterday, as you found: to-day I shall walk, beside seeing Chorley. And certainly, certainly I would go away for a week, if so I might escape being ill (and away from you) a fortnight; but I am not ill  – – and will care, as you bid me, beloved! So, you will send, and take all trouble; and all about that crazy Review! Now, you should not!  – – I will consider about your goodness. I hardly know if I care to read that kind of book just now.

Will you, and must you have ‘Pauline’? If I could pray you to revoke that decision! For it is altogether foolish and not boylike  – – and I shall, I confess, hate the notion of running over it  – – yet commented it must be; more than mere correction! I was unluckily precocious  – – but I had rather you saw real infantine efforts (verses at six years old, and drawings still earlier) than this ambiguous, feverish  – – Why not wait? When you speak of the ‘Bookseller’  – – I smile, in glorious security  – – having a whole bale of sheets at the house-top. He never knew my name even!  – – and I withdrew these after a very little time.

And now  – – here is a vexation. May I be with you (for this once) next Monday, at two instead of three o’clock? Forster’s business with the new Paper obliges him, he says, to restrict his choice of days to Monday next  – – and give up my part of Monday I will never for fifty Forsters  – – now, sweet, mind that! Monday is no common day, but leads to a Saturday  – – and if, as I ask, I get leave to call at 2  – – and to stay till 3-1/2  – – though I then lose nearly half an hour  – – yet all will be comparatively well. If there is any difficulty  – – one word and I re-appoint our party, his and mine, for the day the paper breaks down  – – not so long to wait, it strikes me!

Now, bless you, my precious Ba  – – I am your own  – –

 – – Your own R.

 

Wednesday.

January 14, 1846.

Was I in the wrong, dearest, to go away with Mr. Kenyon? I well knew and felt the price I was about to pay  – – but the thought did occur that he might have been informed my probable time of departure was that of his own arrival  – – and that he would not know how very soon, alas, I should be obliged to go  – – so  . . . to save you any least embarrassment in the world, I got  – – just that shake of the hand, just that look  – – and no more! And was it all for nothing, all needless after all? So I said to myself all the way home.

When I am away from you  – – a crowd of things press on me for utterance  – – ‘I will say them, not write them,’ I think:  – – when I see you  – – all to be said seems insignificant, irrelevant,  – – ‘they can be written, at all events’  – – I think that too. So, feeling so much, I say so little!

I have just returned from Town and write for the Post  – – but you mean to write, I trust.

That was not obtained, that promise, to be happy with, as last time!

How are you?  – – tell me, dearest; a long week is to be waited now!

Bless you, my own, sweetest Ba.

I am wholly your

R.