Sunday.
[Post-mark, May 4, 1846.]
When I said one more letter might come before to-morrow, I forgot. How used I to manage in the early ‘day of small things’—comparatively—when letters came once a week at most, and yet I felt myself so rich, dearest!
I want you to remember, Ba, what I shall be nearly sure to forget when closer to you than now; tell me to-morrow. If I chance to see Mrs. Jameson in the course of the week what am I to say,—that is, what have you decided on saying? Does she know that you write to me? Because there is a point of simple good taste to be preserved ... I must not listen with indifference if I am told that ‘her friend Miss B.’ thought well of the last number. But she must know we write, I think,—never make any secret of that, when the subject is brought forward.
Here is warm May weather, my Ba; I do not shiver by sympathy as I fancy you going down-stairs. I shall hope to see the sweet face look its ... now, what? ‘Best’ would be altogether an impertinence,—unless you help my meaning, which is ‘best,’ too.
I received two days ago a number of the People’s Journal—from our illustrious contemporary, Bennett! Bennett figures where Barrett might have fronted the world. Fact! I will cut you out his very original lyric[2]—observe the felicitous emendation in the author’s own blue ink ... that supplemental trochee makes a musical line of it! Mary Howitt follows with a pretty, washy, very meritorious Lyric of Life. There is ‘a guilty one’—‘Name her not!’ ‘Virtue turns aside for shame’
She was born of guilty kin—
Her life’s course hath guilty been—
Unto school she never went—
And whate’er she learned was sin,—
Let Her Die!