It was very curious, the phenomenon about your ‘Only a Player-Girl.’  What an un-godlike indifference to your creatures though—­your worlds, breathed away from you like soap bubbles, and dropping and breaking into russet portfolios unobserved!  Only a god for the Epicurean, at best, can you be?  That Miss Cushman went to Three Mile Cross the other day, and visited Miss Mitford, and pleased her a good deal, I fancied from what she said, ... and with reason, from what you say.  And ‘Only a Fiddler,’ as I forgot to tell you yesterday, is announced, you may see in any newspaper, as about to issue from the English press by Mary Howitt’s editorship.  So we need not go to America for it.  But if you complain of George Sand for want of art, how could you bear Andersen, who can see a thing under his eyes and place it under yours, and take a thought separately into his soul and express it insularly, but has no sort of instinct towards wholeness and unity; and writes a book by putting so many pages together, ... just so!—­For the rest, there can be no disagreeing with you about the comparative difficulty of novel-writing and drama-writing.  I disagree a little, lower down in your letter, because I could not deny (in my own convictions) a certain proportion of genius to the author of ‘Ernest Maltravers,’ and ‘Alice’ (did you ever read those books?), even if he had more impotently tried (supposing it to be possible) for the dramatic laurel.  In fact his poetry, dramatic or otherwise, is ‘nought’; but for the prose romances, and for ‘Ernest Maltravers’ above all, I must lift up my voice and cry.  And I read the Athenaeum about your Sir James Wylie who took you for an Italian....

’Poi vi diro Signor, che ne fu causa
Ch’ avio fatto al scriver debita pausa.’—­

Ever your

E.B.B.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Friday Morning.
[Post-mark, August 15, 1845.]

Do you know, dear friend, it is no good policy to stop up all the vents of my feeling, nor leave one for safety’s sake, as you will do, let me caution you never so repeatedly.  I know, quite well enough, that your ‘kindness’ is not so apparent, even, in this instance of correcting my verses, as in many other points—­but on such points, you lift a finger to me and I am dumb....  Am I not to be allowed a word here neither?

I remember, in the first season of German Opera here, when ‘Fidelio’s’ effects were going, going up to the gallery in order to get the best of the last chorus—­get its oneness which you do—­and, while perched there an inch under the ceiling, I was amused with the enormous enthusiasm of an elderly German (we thought,—­I and a cousin of mine)—­whose whole body broke out in billow, heaved and swayed in the perfection of his delight, hands, head, feet, all tossing and striving to utter what possessed him.  Well—­next week, we went again to the Opera, and again mounted at the proper time, but the crowd was greater,