I am sorry to hear of poor Tennyson's condition. The projected book—title, scheme, all of it,—that is astounding;—and fairies? If 'Thorpes and barnes, sheep-pens and dairies—this maketh that there ben no fairies'—locomotives and the broad or narrow gauge must keep the very ghosts of them away. But how the fashion of this world passes; the forms its beauty and truth take; if we have the making of such! I went last night, out of pure shame at a broken promise, to hear Miss Cushman and her sister in 'Romeo and Juliet.' The whole play goes ... horribly; 'speak' bids the Poet, and so M. Walladmir [Valdemar] moves his tongue and dispenses with his jaws. Whatever is slightly touched in, indicated, to give relief to something actually insisted upon and drawn boldly ... here, you have it gone over with an unremitting burnt-stick, till it stares black forever! Romeo goes whining about Verona by broad daylight. Yet when a schoolfellow of mine, I remember, began translating in class Virgil after this mode, 'Sic fatur—so said Æneas; lachrymans—a-crying' ... our pedagogue turned on him furiously—'D'ye think Æneas made such a noise—as you shall, presently?' How easy to conceive a boyish half-melancholy, smiling at itself.

Then Tuesday, and not Monday ... and Saturday will be the nearer afterward. I am singularly well to-day—head quite quiet—and yesterday your penholder began its influence and I wrote about half my last act. Writing is nothing, nor praise, nor blame, nor living, nor dying, but you are all my true life; May God bless you ever—

R.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Friday Evening.
[Post-mark, February 2, 1846.]

Something, you said yesterday, made me happy—'that your liking for me did not come and go'—do you remember? Because there was a letter, written at a crisis long since, in which you showed yourself awfully, as a burning mountain, and talked of 'making the most of your fire-eyes,' and of having at intervals 'deep black pits of cold water'!—and the lava of that letter has kept running down into my thoughts of you too much, until quite of late—while even yesterday I was not too well instructed to be 'happy,' you see! Do not reproach me! I would not have 'heard your enemy say so'—it was your own word! And the other long word idiosyncrasy seemed long enough to cover it; and it might have been a matter of temperament, I fancied, that a man of genius, in the mystery of his nature, should find his feelings sometimes like dumb notes in a piano ... should care for people at half past eleven on Tuesday, and on Wednesday at noon prefer a black beetle. How you frightened me with your 'fire-eyes'! 'making the most of them' too! and the 'black pits,' which gaped ... where did they gape? who could tell? Oh—but lately I have not been crossed so, of course, with those fabulous terrors—lately that horror of the burning mountain has grown more like a superstition than a rational fear!—and if I was glad ... happy ... yesterday, it was but as a tolerably sensible nervous man might be glad of a clearer moonlight, showing him that what he had half shuddered at for a sheeted ghoule, was only a white horse on the moor. Such a great white horse!—call it the 'mammoth horse'—the 'real mammoth,' this time!

Dearest, did I write you a cold letter the last time? Almost it seems so to me! the reason being that my feelings were near to overflow, and that I had to hold the cup straight to prevent the possible dropping on your purple underneath. Your letter, the letter I answered, was in my heart ... is in my heart—and all the yeses in the world would not be too many for such a letter, as I felt and feel. Also, perhaps, I gave you, at last, a merely formal distinction—and it comes to the same thing practically without any doubt! but I shrank, with a sort of instinct, from appearing (to myself, mind) to take a security from your words now (said too on an obvious impulse) for what should, would, must, depend on your deliberate wishes hereafter. You understand—you will not accuse me of over-cautiousness and the like. On the contrary, you are all things to me, ... instead of all and better than all! You have fallen like a great luminous blot on the whole leaf of the world ... of life and time ... and I can see nothing beyond you, nor wish to see it. As to all that was evil and sadness to me, I do not feel it any longer—it may be raining still, but I am in the shelter and can scarcely tell. If you could be too dear to me you would be now—but you could not—I do not believe in those supposed excesses of pure affections—God cannot be too great.

Therefore it is a conditional engagement still—all the conditions being in your hands, except the necessary one, of my health. And shall I tell you what is 'not to be put in doubt ever'?—your goodness, that is ... and every tie that binds me to you. 'Ordained, granted by God' it is, that I should owe the only happiness in my life to you, and be contented and grateful (if it were necessary) to stop with it at this present point. Still I do not—there seems no necessity yet.

May God bless you, ever dearest:—

Your own Ba.