[1838.]
Thank you, dearest Mr. Kenyon; and I should (and shall) thank Miss Thomson too for caring to spend a thought on me after all the Parisian glories and rationalities which I sympathise with by many degrees nearer than you seem to do. We, in this England here, are just social barbarians, to my mind—that is, we know how to read and write and think, and even talk on occasion; but we carry the old rings in our noses, and are proud of the flowers pricked into our cuticles. By so much are they better than we on the Continent, I always think. Life has a thinner rind, and so a livelier sap. And that I can see in the books and the traditions, and always understand people who like living in France and Germany, and should like it myself, I believe, on some accounts.
Where did you get your Bacchanalian song? Witty, certainly, but the recollection of the scores a little ghastly for the occasion, perhaps. You have yourself sung into silence, too, all possible songs of Bacchus, as the god and I know.
Here is a delightful letter from Miss Martineau. I cannot be so selfish as to keep it to myself. The sense of natural beauty and the good sense of the remarks on rural manners are both exquisite of their kinds, and Wordsworth is Wordsworth as she knows him. Have I said that Friday will find me expecting the kind visit you promise? That, at least, is what I meant to say with all these words.
Ever affectionately yours,
E.B.B.
To John Kenyon
Wimpole Street: Sunday evening [1838?].
My dear Mr. Kenyon,—I am so sorry to hear of your going, and I not able to say 'good-bye' to you, that—I am not writing this note on that account.
It is a begging note, and now I am wondering to myself whether you will think me very childish or womanish, or silly enough to be both together (I know your thoughts upon certain parallel subjects), if I go on to do my begging fully. I hear that you are going to Mr. Wordsworth's—to Rydal Mount—and I want you to ask for yourself, and then to send to me in a letter—by the post, I mean, two cuttings out of the garden—of myrtle or geranium; I care very little which, or what else. Only I say 'myrtle' because it is less given to die and I say two to be sure of my chances of saving one. Will you? You would please me very much by doing it; and certainly not dis please me by refusing to do it. Your broadest 'no' would not sound half so strange to me as my 'little crooked thing' does to you; but you see everybody in the world is fanciful about something, and why not E.B.B.?