And you take me to be too generous if you fancy that I proposed giving up the daily letter which is my daily bread. I meant only that you should not, for the sake of a particular post, tire yourself, hurry yourself, ... do what you did yesterday. As for the daily letter, I am Ba—not Miss Barrett. Now, am I Miss Barrett? am I not Ba rather, and your Ba? I should like to hear what will be heard to-morrow. Oh—I should like to be under the table, or in a pasty, after the fashion of the queen’s dwarf when Elizabeth was queen and Shakespeare poet. Shall you be nervous, as I was with Mrs. Jameson? Oh no,—why should you be nervous? You will do it all well and gracefully—I am not afraid for you. It is simply out of vain-glory that I wish to be there! Only ... the dramatists of England ... where in the world are they just now? Or will somebody prove ten of them,—because nought after one, makes exactly ten? Mr. Horne indeed. But I wish the toast had been ‘the poets of England,’ rather. May God bless you, any way! ‘I love you whatever comes of it.’ Yes, unless sorrow of yours should come of it, that is what I like to hear. Better it is, than a thousand praises of this thing and that thing, which never were mine ... alas!—Also, loving me so, you can be made happy with laburnum-leaves!—Dearest—most dear! Dare I speak, do you think?
Exactly at eight to-morrow, and exactly at three the next day, I shall be with you—being at any hour
Your very own.
The walk did me no harm. But you say nothing of yourself!
R.B. to E.B.B.
Wednesday.
[Post-mark, May 13, 1846.]
Dearest, dearest, I shall be with you to-morrow and be comforted—and will tell you all about everything. I am a little tired (but very well, altogether well, singularly so)—and I do feel a little about to-night’s affair, though you may not. You, indeed, to judge me by yourself! But, after all I do not greatly care ... I can but get up and stammer and say ‘thank you’ and sit down again, like my betters,—and—as I say and say,—you are at the end of everything ... so long as I find you! I hoped that Tennyson was to have been Poet-respondent—but Moxon says ‘no’ ... and, moreover, that the Committee had meant (and he supposed had acted upon their meaning) to offer me the choice of taking either qualification, of Poetry or the Drama, as mine ... but they have altered their mind. As it is ... observe—(you will find a list of Stewards in last Athenæum)—observe that they are all Bishops or Deans or Doctors ... and that all will be grave and heavy enough, I dare say. So I shall try and speak for about five minutes on the advantages of the Press over the Stage as a medium of communication of the Drama ... and so get done, if Heaven please!
I saw Tennyson last night—and ... oh, let me tell you to-morrow. Also, Severn, I saw ... Keats’ Severn, who bought his own posthumous picture of Keats, and talked pleasantly about him and Shelley (Tennyson asked me ‘what I thought of Shelley’—in so many words). Moxon’s care of him,—Tennyson, not Severn,—is the charmingest thing imaginable, and he seems to need it all—being in truth but a long, hazy kind of a man, at least just after dinner ... yet there is something ‘naif’ about him, too,—the genius you see, too.
May God bless you, my dearest dearest,—to-morrow repays for all—