Think if people were to get hold of that imputation on poor Mrs. Norton—think!
E.B.B. to R.B.
Tuesday Morning in haste.
[Post-mark, July 7, 1846.]
Dearest, I am uncertain whether I can see you to-morrow. To-night I will write again—you shall hear. You tell me to risk nothing ... which is what I feel. But I long, long to see you. You shall hear in the morning.
Read the note which Mr. Kenyon sends me from Mr. Forster. Very averse I feel, from applying, in the way prescribed, to Mr. Serjeant Talfourd. Tell me what to do, Robert ... my ‘famous in council!’ Sick at heart, it all makes me. Am I to write to Mr. Talfourd, do you think?
Oh, you would manage it for me—but to mix you up in it, will make a danger of a worse evil. May God bless you, my own. I may see you to-morrow perhaps after all—it is a ‘perhaps’ though ... and I am surely
Your Ba.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Tuesday.
[Post-mark, July 7, 1846.]
Dearest, the first thing to say is the deep joyfulness of expecting to see you, really, to-morrow—mind, the engagement with Mr. Kenyon is nothing in the way. If you cannot let me stay the usual time—I can call, pass away the interval easily ... this is a superfluous word to your goodness which is superfluous in these ‘old ways of Ba’s’—dear Ba, whom I kiss with perfect love—and shall soon kiss in no dream! Landor is all well enough in one sentence ... happily turned that is,—but I am vexed at his strange opinion of Goethe’s poem,—and the more, that a few years ago he wrote down as boldly that nothing had been written so ‘Hellenic’ these two thousand years—(in a note to the ‘Satire on the Satirists’)—and of these opinions I think the earlier much nearer the truth. Then he wrote so, because Wordsworth had depreciated Goethe—now, very likely, some maladroit applauder has said Landor’s own ‘Iphigenia’ is worthy of Goethe,—or similar platitudes.