Dearest, do not leave off loving me. Do not forget me by Wednesday. Shall it be Wednesday? or must it be Thursday? answer you.
I am your own
Ba.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Monday.
[Post-mark, July 6, 1846.]
When I read, after the reasons for not seeing you to-day, this—‘still I leave it to you,’—believe, dearest, that I at once made the sacrifice and determined to wait till Wednesday,—as seemed best for you, and therefore for me: but at the letter’s very end, amid the sweetest, comes ‘Wednesday ... or must it be Thursday?’ What is that? What ‘must’ is mine? Shall you fear, or otherwise suffer, if we appoint Wednesday?
Oh, another year of this! Yet I am not, I feel, ungrateful to the Past ... all the obstacles in the world can do nothing now, nothing: earlier they might have proved formidable annoyances. I have seen enough of you, Ba, for an eternity of belief in you ... and you, as you confess, you cannot think ‘I shall forget.’
All you can, you compensate me for the absence—that such letters, instead of being themselves the supremest reward and last of gains, should be—compensation, at the best! Am I really to have you, all of you and altogether, and always? If you go out of your dream-life, can I lie quietly in mine? But I hold your hand and hear your voice through it all.
How do these abrupt changes in the temperature affect you? Yesterday at noon, so oppressively hot—this morning, a wind and a cold. Do you feel no worse than usual? If you do not tell me,—you know, I cannot keep away. Then, this disinspiriting bequest of poor Haydon’s journal ... his ‘writings’—from which all the harm came, and, it should seem, is still to come to himself and everybody beside—let us all forget what came of those descriptions and vindications and explanations interminable; but as for beginning another sorrowful issue of them,—it is part and parcel of the insanity—and to lay the business of editing the ‘twenty-six’ (I think) volumes, with the responsibility, on you—most insane! Unless, which one would avoid supposing, the author trusted precisely to your ignorance of facts and isolation from the people able to instruct you. Take one little instance of how ‘facts’ may be set down—in the Athenæum was an account of Haydon’s quoting Waller’s verse about the eagle reached by his own feather on the arrow,—which he applied to Maclise and some others, who had profited by their intimacy with him to turn his precepts to account and so surpass him in public estimation: now, Maclise was in Haydon’s company for the first time at Talfourd’s on that evening when I met your brother there,—so said Talfourd in an after-supper speech,—and Forster, to whom I mentioned the circumstance, assured me that Maclise ‘called on Haydon for the first time only a few months ago’ ... I suppose, shortly after. Now, what right has Maclise, a fine generous fellow, to be subjected to such an imputation as that? With an impartial prudent man, acquainted with the artists of the last thirty years, the editing might turn to profit: I do hope for an exercise of Mr. Kenyon’s caution here, at all events. And then how horrible are all these posthumous revelations,—these passions of the now passionless, errors of the at length better-instructed! All falls unfitly, ungraciously—the triumphs or the despondencies, the hopes or fears, of—whom? He is so far above it all now! Even in this life—imagine a proficient in an art or science, who, after thirty or sixty years of progressive discovery, finds that some bookseller has disinterred and is about publishing the raw first attempt at a work which he was guilty of in the outset!
All of which you know better than I—what do you not know better? Nor as well?—that I love you with my whole heart, Ba, dearest Ba, and look up into your eyes for all light and life. Bless you.