All the while, I know your thought, your purpose in it all,—I believe and am sure—and I bless you from my heart—you will soon know, what you have to know—I believe, beforehand, I repeat.
I am rather out of spirits to-day—thus I feel toward you when at all melancholy ... you would undo me in withdrawing from me your help, undo me, I feel! When, as ordinarily, I am cheerful, I have precisely the same conviction. Does that prove nothing, my Ba?
Well, I give up proving, or trying to prove anything—from the beginning I abjured mere words—and now, much more!
Let me kiss you, ever best and dearest! My life is in the hand you call ‘mine,’—if that hand would ‘shake’ less from letting it fall, I earnestly pray God may relieve you of it nor ever let you be even aware of what followed your relief! For what should one live or die in this world?
I am wholly yours—
Did I not meet two of your brothers yesterday in the Hall? Pray take care of this cold wind—be satisfied with the good deeds of the last few days.
E.B.B. to R.B.
Tuesday.
[Post-mark, May 6, 1846.]
Dearest, it has just come into my head that I should like to carry this letter to the post myself—but no, I shall not be able. Probably the post is far out of reach, and even if it were within reach, my grand scheme of walking in the street is scarcely a possible thing to-day, for I must keep watch in the house from two till five for Lady Margaret Cocks, an old friend of mine, who was kind to me when I was a child, in the country, and has not forgotten me since, when, two months in the year, she has been in the habit of going to London. A good, worthy person, with a certain cultivation as to languages and literature, but quite manquée on the side of the imagination ... talking of the poets, as a blind woman of colours, calling ‘Pippa Passes’ ‘pretty and odd,’ and writing herself ‘poems’ in heaps of copy books which every now and then she brings to show me ... ‘odes’ to Hope and Patience and all the cardinal virtues, with formulas of ‘Begin my muse’ in the fashion ended last century. She has helped to applaud and scold me since I could walk and write verses; and when I was so wicked as to go to dissenting chapels besides, she reproached me with tears in her eyes; but they were tears of earnest partizanship, and not of affection for me, ... she does not love me after all, nor guess at my heart, and I do not love her, I feel. Woe to us! for there are good and unlovable people in the world, and we cannot help it for our lives.