for Heaven’s sake, let this dear old all-abused world keep on its course without these outcries and tearings of hair, and don’t be for ever goading the Karls and other trodden-down creatures till they get their carbines in order (very rationally) to abate the nuisance—­when you make the man a long speech against some enormity he is about to commit, and adjure and beseech and so forth, till he throws down the aforesaid carbine, falls on his knees, and lets the Frederic go quietly on his way to keep on killing his thousands after the fashion that moved your previous indignation.  Now is that right, consequential—­that is, inferential; logically deduced, going straight to the end—­manly?

The accessories are not the Principal, the adjuncts—­the essence, nor the ornamental incidents the book’s self, so what matters it if the portraits are admirable, the descriptions eloquent, (eloquent, there it is—­that is her characteristic—­what she has to speak, she speaks out, speaks volubly forth, too well, inasmuch as you say, advancing a step or two, ’And now speak as completely here’—­and she says nothing)—­but all that, another could do, as others have done—­but ’la femme qui parle’—­Ah, that, is this all?  So I am not George Sand’s—­she teaches me nothing—­I look to her for nothing.

I am ever yours, dearest friend.  How I write to you—­page on page!  But Tuesday—­who could wait till then!  Shall I not hear from you?

God bless you ever

R.B.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Saturday.
[Post-mark, August 16, 1845.]

But what likeness is there between opposites; and what has ’M. l’Italien’ to do with the said ‘elderly German’?  See how little!  For to bring your case into point, somebody should have been playing on a Jew’s harp for the whole of the orchestra; and the elderly German should have quoted something about ‘Harp of Judah’ to the Venetian behind him!  And there, you would have proved your analogy!—­Because you see, my dear friend, it was not the expression, but the thing expressed, I cried out against—­the exaggeration in your mind.  I am sorry when I write what you do not like—­but I have instincts and impulses too strong for me when you say things which put me into such a miserably false position in respect to you—­as for instance, when in this very last letter (oh, I must tell you!) you talk of my ‘correcting your verses’!  My correcting your verses!!!—­Now is that a thing for you to say?—­And do you really imagine that if I kept that happily imagined phrase in my thoughts, I should be able to tell you one word of my impressions from your poetry, ever, ever again?  Do you not see at once what a disqualifying and paralysing phrase it must be, of simple necessity?  So it is I who have reason to complain, ... it appears to me, ... and by no means you—­and in your ’second consideration’ you become aware of it, I do not at all doubt.