E.B.B. to R.B.
Friday.
[Post-mark, May 30, 1846.]
I have your letter ... you who cannot write! The contrariety is a part of the ‘miracle.’ After all it seems to me that you can write for yourself pretty well—rather too well I used to think from the beginning. But if you persist in the proposition about my doing it for you, leaving room for your signature ... shall it be this way?
Show me how to get rid of you.
(signed) R.B.
Now isn’t it I who am ... not ‘balancing my jewel’ over the gulph ... but actually tossing it up in the air out of sheer levity of joyousness? Only it is not perhaps such dangerous play as it looks: there may be a little string perhaps, tying it to my finger. Which, if it is not imprudence in act, is imprudence in fact, you see!
Dearest, I committed a felony for your sake to-day—so never doubt that I love you. We went to the Botanical Gardens, where it is unlawful to gather flowers, and I was determined to gather this for you, and the gardeners were here and there ... they seemed everywhere ... but I stooped down and gathered it. Is it felony, or burglary on green leaves—or what is the name of the crime? would the people give me up to the police, I wonder? Transie de peur, I was, ... listening to Arabel’s declaration that all gathering of flowers in these gardens is highly improper,—and I made her finish her discourse, standing between me and the gardeners—to prove that I was the better for it.
How pretty those gardens are, by the way! We went to the summer-house and sate there, and then on, to the empty seats where the band sit on your high days. What I enjoy most to see, is the green under the green ... where the grass stretches under trees. That is something unspeakable to me, in the beauty of it. And to stand under a tree and feel the green shadow of the tree! I never knew before the difference of the sensation of a green shadow and a brown one. I seemed to feel that green shadow through and through me, till it went out at the soles of my feet and mixed with the other green below. Is it nonsense, or not? Remember that by too much use we lose the knowledge and apprehension of things, and that I may feel therefore what you do not feel.
But in everything I felt you—and always, dearest beloved, you were nearer to me than the best.
Well; to go on with my story. Coming home and submitting to be carried up-stairs because I was tired, the news was that Miss Bayley had waited to see me three quarters of an hour. Then she sate with me an hour—and oh, such kind, insisting, persisting plans about Italy! I did not know what to say, so I was niaise and grateful, and said ‘thank you, thank you’ as I could. Did Mrs. Jameson tell you of her scheme of going to Florence for two years and to Venice for one, taking her niece with her in order to an ‘artistical education’? And Mr. Bezzi, who is the ‘most accurate of men,’ furnishes the details of necessary expenses, and assures her in his programme that she may ‘walk in silk attire’ and drive her carriage like an English aristocrat, for three hundred a year, at Florence—but the place is English-ridden ... filled and polluted. Sorrento is better or even Pisa. We will keep our Siren-isles to ourselves ... will we not?