To prove to you that I had not forgotten you before your letter came, here is the fragment of an unfinished one which I send you, to begin with—an imperfect fossil letter, which no comparative anatomy will bring much sense out of—except the plain fact that you were not forgotten....

From Alexandria we heard yesterday that they sailed from thence on the first of January, and the home passage may be long.

The changes in Mary Minto on account of mesmerism were merely imaginary as far as I can understand. Nobody here observed any change in her. Oh no. These things will be fancied sometimes. That she is an enthusiastic girl, and that the subject took strong hold upon her, is true enough, and not the least in the world—according to my mind—to be wondered at. By the way, I had a letter and the present of a work on mesmerism—Mr. Newnham's—from his daughter, who sent it to me the other day, in the kindest way, 'out of gratitude for my poetry,' as she says, and from a desire that it might do me physical good in the matter of health. I do not at all know her. I wrote to thank her, of course, for the kindness and sympathy which, as she expressed them, quite touched me; and to explain how I did not stand in reach just now of the temptations of mesmerism. I might have said that I shrank nearly as much from these 'temptations' as from Lord Bacon's stew of infant children for the purposes of witchcraft.

Well, then, I am getting deeper and deeper into correspondence with Robert Browning, poet and mystic, and we are growing to be the truest of friends. If I live a little longer shut up in this room, I shall certainly know everybody in the world. Mrs. Jameson came again yesterday, and was very agreeable, but tried vainly to convince me that the 'Vestiges of Creation,' which I take to be one of the most melancholy books in the world, is the most comforting, and that Lady Byron was an angel of a wife. I persisted (in relation to the former clause) in a 'determinate counsel' not to be a fully developed monkey if I could help it, but when Mrs. J. assured me that she knew all the circumstances of the separation, though she could not betray a confidence, and entreated me 'to keep my mind open' on a subject which would one day be set in the light, I stroked down my feathers as well as I could, and listened to reason. You know—or perhaps you do not know—that there are two women whom I have hated all my life long—Lady Byron and Marie Louise. To prove how false the public effigy of the former is, however, Mrs. Jameson told me that she knew nothing of mathematics, nothing of science, and that the element preponderating in her mind is the poetical element—that she cares much for my poetry! How deep in the knowledge of the depths of vanity must Mrs. J. be, to tell me that—now mustn't she? But there was—yes, and is—a strong adverse feeling to work upon, and it is not worked away.

Then, I have seen a copy of a note of Lord Morpeth to H. Martineau, to the effect that he considered the mesmeric phenomena witnessed by him (inclusive, remember, of the languages) to be 'equally beautiful, wonderful, and undeniable' but he is prudent enough to desire that no use should be made of this letter ... And now no more for to-day.

With love to Mr. Martin, ever believe me
Your affectionate
BA.

To John Kenyan

Saturday, February 8, 1845.

I return to you, dearest Mr. Kenyon, the two numbers of Jerold Douglas's[[128]] magazine, and I wish 'by that same sign' I could invoke your presence and advice on a letter I received this morning. You never would guess what it is, and you will wonder when I tell you that it offers a request from the Leeds Ladies' Committee, authorised and backed by the London General Council of the League, to your cousin Ba, that she would write them a poem for the Corn Law Bazaar to be holden at Covent Garden next May. Now my heart is with the cause, and my vanity besides, perhaps, for I do not deny that I am pleased with the request so made, and if left to myself I should be likely at once to say 'yes,' and write an agricultural-evil poem to complete the factory-evil poem into a national-evil circle. And I do not myself see how it would be implicating my name with a political party to the extent of wearing a badge. The League is not a party, but 'the meeting of the waters' of several parties, and I am trying to persuade papa's Whiggery that I may make a poem which will be a fair exponent of the actual grievance, leaving the remedy free for the hands of fixed-duty men like him, or free-trade women like myself. As to wearing the badge of a party, either in politics or religion, I may say that never in my life was I so far from coveting such a thing. And then poetry breathes in another outer air. And then there is not an existent set of any-kind-of-politics I could agree with if I tried—I, who am a sort of fossil republican! You shall see the letters when you come. Remember what the 'League' newspaper said of the 'Cry of the Children.'

Ever affectionately yours,
E.B.B.