And for the League newspaper, you mistook me, and I forgot to say so in my letter yesterday. I told you only that the League paper had mentioned me—not noticed me. It was just ... I just shall tell you, that you may not spend another thought on such a deep subject ... it was a mere quotation from the ‘cornships in the offing,’ with a prefatory as that exquisite poet Miss B ... says! Now you are done with the winter of your discontent? You are with the snowdrops at any rate. But last year there was a regular criticism on my poems in that League paper, and I had every reason to thank the critic. I have heard too that Cobden is a very gracious reader of mine ... and that his Leeds (liege) subjects generally do me the honours of popularity, more than any other people in England. There’s glory for you, talking of palm-trees.
Ah—talking of palm-trees, you do not know what a curious coincidence your thought is with a thought of mine, which I shall not tell you now ... but some day perhaps. There’s a mystery! talking of Venice!
For Balzac, I have had my full or overfull pleasure from that habit of his you speak of, ... and which seems to prove his own good faith in the life and reality of his creations, in such a striking manner. He is a writer of most wonderful faculty—with an overflow of life everywhere—with the vision and the utterance of a great seer. His French is another language—he throws new metals into it ... malleable metals, which fuse with the heat of his genius. There is no writer in France, to my mind, at all comparable to Balzac—none—but where is the reader in England to make the admission?—none, again ... is almost to be said.
But, dearest, you do not say how you are; and that silence is not lawful, and is too significant. For me, when the wind changed for a few hours to-day, I went down-stairs with Flush, and had my walk in the drawing-room. Mrs. Jameson has written to proclaim her coming to-morrow at four,—so I shall hear of ‘Luria,’ I think. Remember to bring my verses, if you please, on your Thursday. And if dreaming of me should be good for making you love me, let me be dreamt of ... go on to dream of me: and love me, my beloved, ever so much, without grudging,—because the love returns to you, all of it, ... as the wave to the sea; and with an addition of sundry grains of soiling sand, to make you properly grateful. Take care of yourself—may God take care of you for your own
Ba.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Wednesday.
[Post-mark, April 29, 1846.]
Oh, post, post, how I am plagued by what uses to delight me! No letter,—and I cannot but think you have written one, my Ba! It will come perhaps at 3 o’clock. Shame and again, shame!
Meantime I will tell you what a dear, merciful Ba you are, in only threatening me with daggers,—when you play at threatening,—instead of declaring you will frown at me.... Oh, but here ‘Fear recoils, he knows well why, even at the sound himself has made—’
The best of it is, that this was the second fright, and by no means the most formidable. When I read that paragraph beginning ‘you need not think any more of going with me to Italy’—shall I only say I was alarmed? Without a particle of affectation, I tell Ba, I am, cannot help being, alarmed even now—we have been discussing possibilities—and it is rather more possible than probable that Miss Bayley may ‘carry off’ my Ba, and her Flush, and, say, an odd volume of the Cyclic Poets, all in her pocket ... she being, if I remember, of the race of the Anakim—than that I shall ever find in the wide world a flesh and blood woman able to bear the weight of the ‘feelings,’ I rest now upon the B and the A which spell Ba’s name,—only her name!