After all I do thank you for these flowers—­and they are beautiful—­and they came just in a right current of time, just when I wanted them, or something like them—­so I confess that humbly, and do thank you, at last, rather as I ought to do.  Only you ought not to give away all the flowers of your garden to me; and your sister thinks so, be sure—­if as silently as you sent them.  Now I shall not write any more, not having been written to.  What with the Wednesday’s flowers and these, you may think how I in this room, look down on the gardens of Damascus, let your Jew[1] say what he pleases of them—­and the Wednesday’s flowers are as fresh and beautiful, I must explain, as the new ones.  They were quite supererogatory ... the new ones ... in the sense of being flowers.  Now, the sense of what I am writing seems questionable, does it not?—­at least, more so, than the nonsense of it.

Not a word, even under the little blue flowers!!!—­

E.B.B.

[Footnote 1:  ‘R.  Benjamin of Tudela’ added in Robert Browning’s handwriting.]

R.B. to E.B.B.

Sunday Afternoon.
[Post-mark, August 11, 1845.]

How good you are to the smallest thing I try and do—­(to show I would please you for an instant if I could, rather than from any hope such poor efforts as I am restricted to, can please you or ought.) And that you should care for the note that was not there!—­But I was surprised by the summons to seal and deliver, since time and the carrier were peremptory—­and so, I dared divine, almost, I should hear from you by our mid-day post—­which happened—­and the answer to that, you received on Friday night, did you not?  I had to go to Holborn, of all places,—­not to pluck strawberries in the Bishop’s Garden like Richard Crouchback, but to get a book—­and there I carried my note, thinking to expedite its delivery:  this notelet of yours, quite as little in its kind as my blue flowers,—­this came last evening—­and here are my thanks, dear E.B.B.—­dear friend.

In the former note there is a phrase I must not forget to call on you to account for—­that where it confesses to having done ’some work—­only nothing worth speaking of.’  Just see,—­will you be first and only compact-breaker?  Nor misunderstand me here, please, ... as I said, I am quite rejoiced that you go out now, ‘walk about’ now, and put off the writing that will follow thrice as abundantly, all because of the stopping to gather strength ... so I want no new word, not to say poem, not to say the romance-poem—­let the ’finches in the shrubberies grow restless in the dark’—­I am inside with the lights and music:  but what is done, is done, pas vrai?  And ‘worth’ is, dear my friend, pardon me, not in your arbitration quite.