God bless you, dearest—I love you all I can, Ba. I see another ship is advertised to sail—(a steamer) for Naples, and other southern ports—but no higher. When you are well and disposed to go to Greece, take me, my love. I should feel too happy for this world, I think, among the islands with you.

My very own, I am yours—

E.B.B. to R.B.

Tuesday Evening.
[Post-mark, August 19, 1846.]

Your mother is not well, dearest? that is bad news indeed. And then, I think of your superstition of your being ill and well with her—take care and keep well, Robert, ... or of what use will it be that I should be well? To-day we drove out, and were as far as Finchley, and I am none the worse at all for it. Do you know Finchley? It is pretty and rural; the ground rising and falling as if with the weight of verdure and dew! fields, and hedgerows, and long slopes of grass thick and long enough, in its fresh greenness, quite to hide the nostrils of the grazing cows. The fields are little, too, as if the hedges wanted to get together. Then the village of Finchley straggles along the road with a line of cottages, or small houses, seeming to play at a village. No butchers, no bakers—only one shop in the place—but gardens, and creepers round the windows. Such a way from London, it looked! Arabel wanted to call on a friend of hers, a daughter of Sir William Russell’s, who married an adopted son of Lamartine, and was in the navy, and is now an Independent minister officiating in this selfsame metropolis of Finchley. A concatenation, that is, altogether. Very poor they are—living on something less than two hundred a year, with five children, and the eldest five years old. And the children came out to us, everybody else being away—so I, who would have stayed in the carriage under other circumstances, was tempted out by the children and the cottage, and they dragged us along to see the drawing room, and dining room, and ‘Papa’s flowers,’ and their own particular book ‘about the twenty-seven tailors’; and those of the children who could speak, thought Flush ‘very cool’ for walking up-stairs without being asked. (The baby opened its immense eyes wider than ever, thinking unutterable things.) So as they had been so kind and hospitable to us, we could not do less (after a quantity of admiration upon the pretty house covered with roses, and the garden and lawn, and especially the literature of those twenty-seven tailors) we could not do less than offer to give them a drive ... which was accepted with acclamation. Think of our taking into the carriage, all five children, with their prodigious eyes and cheeks—the nurse on the coachbox, to take them home at the end of some quarter of a mile! At the moment of parting, Alphonse Lamartine thought seriously of making a great scream—but upon Arabel’s perjuring herself by a promise to ‘come again soon,’ we got away without that catastrophe. A worse one is, that you may think yourself obliged to read this amusing history. To make amends, I send you what I gathered for you in the garden ‘Pansy!—that’s for thoughts.’[5]

How wise we are about Thursday! or rather about Tuesday and Wednesday, perhaps.

As for Mr. Boyd, he had just heard your name, but he is blind and deaf to modern literature, and I am not anxious that he should know you much by your poetry. He asked some questions about you, and he enquired of Arabel particularly whether she thought we cared for each other enough. But to tell you the truth, his unqualified adhesion strikes me as less the result of his love for you, than of his anger towards another. I am sure he triumphs inwardly in the idea of a chain being broken which he has so often denounced in words that pained and vexed me—and then last year’s affair about Italy made him furious. Oh—I could see plainly by the sort of smile he smiled—but we need not talk of it—I am at the end too of my time. How good you are to me not to upbraid me for imprudence and womanly talkativeness! You are too, too good. And you liked my verses to Mr. Boyd! Which I like to hear, of course. Dearest—

Shall we go to Greece then, Robert? Let us, if you like it! When we have used a little the charm of your Italy, and have been in England just to see that everybody is well, of yours and mine, ... (if you like that!) ... why straightway we can go ‘among the islands’—(and nearly as pleasant, it will be for me, as if I went there alone, having left you!). I should like to see Athens with my living eyes ... Athens was in all the dreams I dreamed, before I knew you. Why should we not see Athens, and Egypt too, and float down the mystical Nile, and stand in the shadow of the Pyramids? All of it is more possible now, than walking up this street seemed to me last year.

Indeed, there is only one miracle for me, my beloved,—and that is your loving me. Everything else under the sun, and much over it, seems the merest commonplace and workday matter-of-fact. If I found myself, suddenly, riding in Paradise, on a white elephant of golden feet, ... I should shake the bridle, I fancy, with ever so much nonchalance, and absently wonder over ‘that miracle’ of the previous world. Because ‘That’s for thoughts,’ as my flower says! look at it and listen.

As for me, I am your very own—