I am obliged to leave off here—I love you ever my best
dearest, own Ba!
E.B.B. to R.B.
Monday Morning.
[Post-mark, June 9, 1846.]
The stars threaten you with a long letter to-day, it seems, for I stretch out my hand and take blindly the largest sheet. Dearest, I have been driving out before your letter came ... and to Hampstead! think of that. And see the proof of it—this grew in the hedges when the sun rose to-day. We had a great branch gathered, and ‘this was of it,’ starred over with dog-roses. I did in the morning long for air, through the suffocation yesterday, and the walking being better for another day, my sisters persuaded me into the carriage. Only I wanted to wait for your letter, my letter, and could not—it did not come by the usual early post, and the carriage was here before it ... so I had to go, thinking of it all the way, and having it on my return ready to gladden me. How you make me laugh with your phrenologist! ‘For the interests of science’ you should have given your name. Then, would have come the whole history in the next lecture, ... how ‘Once in an omnibus he met an individual with a forehead and eyes of mark, and knew him at a glance for the first poet of the age.’ It would have made a feature in the lecture, and highly developed, I dare say, ... to suit the features in the omnibus. Just at the moment of this observation I too was thinking of eyes—‘calm eyes’ did I say? Yes, calm, serene ... which was what struck me first of all, in the look of them—was it ever observed before, I wonder? The most serene spiritual eyes, I ever saw—I thought that the first day I saw you. They may be called by other names beside, but they shall not lose the name I then gave them. Now to bear with the horrible portrait in the matter of the eyes, is a hard thing—Mr. Howitt must have his shut nearly, I think. The hair is like—and nothing else. The mouth, the form of the cheek, one is as unlike as the other. And the character of the whole is most unlike of the whole—it is a vulgarized caricature—and I only wonder how I could have fastened it inside of my ‘Paracelsus’ frontispiece-fashion. When it was hung up and framed, I did not know you face to face, remember. Mr. Kenyon told me it was ‘rather like.’ But always and uninstructed I seemed to know that it was not like you in some things....
Monday Evening.—Observe how the sentence breaks off! While I was writing it, came a ‘tapping, tapping at the chamber door,’ as sings my dedicator Edgar Poe. Flush barked vociferously; I threw down the pen and shut up the writing case, ... and lo, Mrs. Jameson! I suppose she did not guess that I was writing to you. She brought me the engravings of Xanthian marbles, and also her new essays ... and was very kind as usual, and proposed to come some day next week with a carriage to take me out,—and all this time, how we treat her! Will she not have a right to complain of being denied the degree of confidence we gave ( ... Mr. Kenyon gave for me ...) to Miss Bayley? Will she not think hereafter ‘There was no need of their deceiving me?’ And yet I doubt how to retreat now. Could I possibly say to her the next time she speaks of you ... or could I not? it would set her on suspecting perhaps. She talked a little to-day of Italy, and plainly asked me what thoughts I had of it,—to which I could answer truthfully ‘No thoughts, but dreams.’ Then she insisted, ‘But whenever you have thoughts, you will let me know them? You will not be in Italy when I am there, without my knowing it? And where will you go—? to Pisa? ... to Sienna? to Naples?’ And she advised ... ‘Don’t go where the English are, in any case.’ And encouraged like an oracle, ... ‘Remember that where there’s a will there’s a way’—knowing no more what she spoke, than a Pythian on the serpent’s skin.
Beloved, you are right in your fear about Mr. Lough. I have decided not to go there. Oh, it is best certainly; and, quietly considered, I shall be happier as well as safer in not going. We must walk softly on the snowdrifts of the world, now that we have got to them.
For the rest, ... that is for the chief thing ... you wrote foolishly in your first letter to-day, my beloved,—you can write foolishly on occasion, let me grant to the critics. I have just so much logic as to be able to see (though I am a woman) that for me to be too good for you, and for you to be too good for me, cannot be true at once, both ways. Now I could discern and prove, from the beginning of the beginning, that you were too good for me—it is too late therefore to take up the other argument—the handle of it was broken last year.
Also, I do not go to the world to ask it to appraise you—I would fain leave to Robins the things of Robins. I hope you have repented all day to-day having written so foolishly yesterday. Even Robins would not justify you.