I shall hear? yes! And admire my obedience in having written 'a long letter' to the letter!
R.B. to E.B.B.
Wednesday Morning.
[Post-mark, February 11, 1846.]
My sweetest 'plague,' did I really write that sentence so, without gloss or comment in close vicinity? I can hardly think it—but you know well, well where the real plague lay,—that I thought of you as thinking, in your infinite goodness, of untoward chances which had kept me from you—and if I did not dwell more particularly on that thinking of yours, which became as I say, in the knowledge of it, a plague when brought before me with the thought of you,—if I passed this slightly over it was for pure unaffected shame that I should take up the care and stop the 'reverie serene' of—ah, the rhyme lets me say—'sweetest eyes were ever seen'—were ever seen! And yourself confess, in the Saturday's note, to having been 'unhappy for half an hour till' &c. &c.—and do not I feel that here, and am not I plagued by it?
Well, having begun at the end of your letter, dearest, I will go back gently (that is backwards) and tell you I 'sate thinking' too, and with no greater comfort, on the cold yesterday. The pond before the window was frozen ('so as to bear sparrows' somebody said) and I knew you would feel it—'but you are not unwell'—really? thank God—and the month wears on. Beside I have got a reassurance—you asked me once if I were superstitious, I remember (as what do I forget that you say?). However that may be, yesterday morning as I turned to look for a book, an old fancy seized me to try the 'sortes' and dip into the first page of the first I chanced upon, for my fortune; I said 'what will be the event of my love for Her'—in so many words—and my book turned out to be—'Cerutti's Italian Grammar!'—a propitious source of information ... the best to be hoped, what could it prove but some assurance that you were in the Dative Case, or I, not in the ablative absolute? I do protest that, with the knowledge of so many horrible pitfalls, or rather spring guns with wires on every bush ... such dreadful possibilities of stumbling on 'conditional moods,' 'imperfect tenses,' 'singular numbers,'—I should have been too glad to put up with the safe spot for the sole of my foot though no larger than afforded by such a word as 'Conjunction,' 'possessive pronoun—,' secure so far from poor Tippet's catastrophe. Well, I ventured, and what did I find? This—which I copy from the book now—'If we love in the other world as we do in this, I shall love thee to eternity'—from 'Promiscuous Exercises,' to be translated into Italian, at the end.
And now I reach Horne and his characteristics—of which I can tell you with confidence that they are grossly misrepresented where not altogether false—whether it proceed from inability to see what one may see, or disinclination, I cannot say. I know very little of Horne, but my one visit to him a few weeks ago would show the uncandidness of those charges: for instance, he talked a good deal about horses, meaning to ride in Ireland, and described very cleverly an old hunter he had hired once,—how it galloped and could not walk; also he propounded a theory of the true method of behaving in the saddle when a horse rears, which I besought him only to practise in fancy on the sofa, where he lay telling it. So much for professing his ignorance in that matter! On a sofa he does throw himself—but when thrown there, he can talk, with Miss Mitford's leave, admirably,—I never heard better stories than Horne's—some Spanish-American incidents of travel want printing—or have been printed, for aught I know. That he cares for nobody's poetry is false, he praises more unregardingly of his own retreat, more unprovidingly for his own fortune,—(do I speak clearly?)—less like a man who himself has written somewhat in the 'line' of the other man he is praising—which 'somewhat' has to be guarded in its interests, &c., less like the poor professional praise of the 'craft' than any other I ever met—instance after instance starting into my mind as I write. To his income I never heard him allude—unless one should so interpret a remark to me this last time we met, that he had been on some occasion put to inconvenience by somebody's withholding ten or twelve pounds due to him for an article, and promised in the confidence of getting them to a tradesman, which does not look like 'boasting of his income'! As for the heiresses—I don't believe one word of it, of the succession and transition and trafficking. Altogether, what miserable 'set-offs' to the achievement of an 'Orion,' a 'Marlowe,' a 'Delora'! Miss Martineau understands him better.
Now I come to myself and my health. I am quite well now—at all events, much better, just a little turning in the head—since you appeal to my sincerity. For the coffee—thank you, indeed thank you, but nothing after the 'oenomel' and before half past six. I know all about that song and its Greek original if Horne does not—and can tell you—, how truly...!
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine—
But might I of Jove's nectar sup
I would not change for thine! No, no, no!
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine—
But might I of Jove's nectar sup
I would not change for thine! No, no, no!
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine—
But might I of Jove's nectar sup
I would not change for thine! No, no, no!