Is it eight o’clock, or three? You write a [figure] which looks like both, or at least either.
Love me, my only beloved; since you can. May God bless you!
I am ever and wholly your
Ba.
Say how you are.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Tuesday.
[Post-mark, May 12, 1846.]
My Ba, your flower is the one flower I have seen, or see or shall see—when it fades ‘I will bless it till it shine,’ and when I can bless you no longer it shall fade with me and my letters and ... perhaps ... my ring. Ba, if ... I was going to say, if you meant to make me most exquisitely happy ... and you did surely mean it ... well, you succeed, as you know! And I see you on the grass, and am with you as you properly acknowledge. And by this letter’s presence and testimony, I may judge you to be not much the worse,—not fatigued ... is it so? Oh, it was a good inspiration that led you through the half-opened gate and under the laburnum, and, better still, that made you see us ‘one day walking by the trees together’—when all I shall say is,—I hope, in spite of that felicity to remember and feel this, as vividly as now.
‘For the chain you hear rattle’ ... there comes the earthly mood again and the inspiration goes away altogether! So you being Miss Barrett and not my Ba for the moment, I will give you none of my, and Ba’s, syren-island illustrations, but ask you, what a fine lady would say if you caught at her diamond necklace and cried—‘You shall wear no such chains,—indeed you shall not!’ Why even Flush is proud of his corals and blue beads, you tell me! As for me,—being used to bear sundry heavier chains than this of writing to you—owning the degradation of being, for instance, forced to respire so many times a minute in order to live—to go out into the open air so as to continue well—with many similarly affronting impositions on a free spirit ... on the whole, I can very patiently submit to write a letter which is duly read, and forgiven for its imperfections, and interpreted into a rationality (sometimes) not its own, and then answered by the sweetest hand that ever ministered to the dearest, dearest Ba that ever was imagined, or can be! Ba,—there are three Syren’s Isles, you know: I shall infallibly get into the farthest of them, a full thirty yards from you and the tower,—so as to need being written to—for the cicale make such a noise that you will not be able to call to me—which is as well, for you may ... that is, I might—break my neck by a sudden leap on the needles of rocks ... as I remember the boatman told me.