The long beard fell like snow into the grave
With solemn grace

The long beard fell like snow into the grave
With solemn grace

A poet, a friend, a generous man Mr. Horne is, even if no laureate for the fairies.

I have this moment a parcel of books via Mr. Moxon—Miss Martineau's two volumes—and Mr. Bailey sends his 'Festus,' very kindly, ... and 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' from America from a Mrs. or a Miss Fuller—how I hate those 'Women of England,' 'Women and their Mission' and the rest. As if any possible good were to be done by such expositions of rights and wrongs.

Your letter would be worth them all, if you were less you! I mean, just this letter, ... all alive as it is with crawling buzzing wriggling cold-blooded warm-blooded creatures ... as all alive as your own pedant's book in the tree. And do you know, I think I like frogs too—particularly the very little leaping frogs, which are so high-hearted as to emulate the birds. I remember being scolded by my nurses for taking them up in my hands and letting them leap from one hand to the other. But for the toad!—why, at the end of the row of narrow beds which we called our gardens when we were children, grew an old thorn, and in the hollow of the root of the thorn, lived a toad, a great ancient toad, whom I, for one, never dared approach too nearly. That he 'wore a jewel in his head' I doubted nothing at all. You must see it glitter if you stooped and looked steadily into the hole. And on days when he came out and sate swelling his black sides, I never looked steadily; I would run a hundred yards round through the shrubs, deeper than knee-deep in the long wet grass and nettles, rather than go past him where he sate; being steadily of opinion, in the profundity of my natural history-learning, that if he took it into his toad's head to spit at me I should drop down dead in a moment, poisoned as by one of the Medici.

Oh—and I had a field-mouse for a pet once, and should have joined my sisters in a rat's nest if I had not been ill at the time (as it was, the little rats were tenderly smothered by over-love!): and blue-bottle flies I used to feed, and hated your spiders for them; yet no, not much. My aversion proper ... call it horror rather ... was for the silent, cold, clinging, gliding bat; and even now, I think, I could not sleep in the room with that strange bird-mouse-creature, as it glides round the ceiling silently, silently as its shadow does on the floor. If you listen or look, there is not a wave of the wing—the wing never waves! A bird without a feather! a beast that flies! and so cold! as cold as a fish! It is the most supernatural-seeming of natural things. And then to see how when the windows are open at night those bats come sailing ... without a sound—and go ... you cannot guess where!—fade with the night-blackness!

You have not been well—which is my first thought if not my first word. Do walk, and do not work; and think ... what I could be thinking of, if I did not think of you ... dear—dearest! 'As the doves fly to the windows,' so I think of you! As the prisoners think of liberty, as the dying think of Heaven, so I think of you. When I look up straight to God ... nothing, no one, used to intercept me—now there is you—only you under him! Do not use such words as those therefore any more, nor say that you are not to be thought of so and so. You are to be thought of every way. You must know what you are to me if you know at all what I am,—and what I should be but for you.

So ... love me a little, with the spiders and the toads and the lizards! love me as you love the efts—and I will believe in you as you believe ... in Ælian—Will that do?

Your own—

Say how you are when you write—and write.