Friday.
[Post-mark, August 21, 1846.]
Dearest, this is to be a brief letter, though my heart shall find room in whatever goes to you. Yesterday cost us nothing—no observation was made: we were in all security notwithstanding the forebodings on either side. May they find such an end in circumstances of still more consequence. Dearest, your flowers are beautiful beyond their beauty of yesterday which I praised—they think themselves still in the garden; we have done them no sort of wrong. What a luring thought you leave with me in the flowers! How I look at them as a sign of you, left behind—your footstep in the ground! It has been so from the beginning. And yet sometimes you try to prove that you are not always good. You!
If you are not good, it is because you are best. I will admit so much.
Oh, to look back! It is so wonderful to me to look back on my life and my old philosophy of life, made of the necessities of sorrow and the resolution to attain to something better than a perpetual moaning and complaint,—to that state of neutralized emotion to which I did attain—that serenity which meant the failure of hope! Can I look back to such things, and not thank you next to God? For you, who had the power, to stoop to having the will,—is it not worthy of thanks? So I thank you and love you and shall always, however it may be hereafter. I could not feel otherwise to you, I think, than by my feeling at this moment.
How Papa has startled me. He came in while I was writing ... (I shut the writing-case as he walked over the floor—) and then, after the usual talk of the weather, and how the nights ‘were growing cold,’ ... he said suddenly ... looking to the table ... ‘What a beautiful colour those little blue flowers have—’ Calling them just so, ... ‘little blue flowers.’ I could scarcely answer I was so frightened—but he observed nothing and turned and left the room with his favourite enquiry pour rire, as to whether he ‘could do anything for me in the City.’
Do anything for me in the City! Well—do you do something for me, by thinking of me and loving me, Robert. Dear you are, never to be tired of me, with so much reason for it as I know. May God bless you, very dear!—and ever dearest! I am your own too entirely to need to say so.
Ba.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Friday.
[Post-mark, August 21, 1846.]
I think—now that the week is over with its opportunities,—and now that no selfish complaining can take advantage of your goodness,—that I will ask you how I feel, do you suppose, without my proper quantity of ‘morphine’? May I call you my morphine?