Remember how you wrote in your ‘Gismond’

    What says the body when they spring
    Some monstrous torture-engine’s whole
    Strength on it?  No more says the soul,

and you never wrote anything which lived with me more than that.  It is such a dreadful truth.  But you knew it for truth, I hope, by your genius, and not by such proof as mine—­I, who could not speak or shed a tear, but lay for weeks and months half conscious, half unconscious, with a wandering mind, and too near to God under the crushing of His hand, to pray at all.  I expiated all my weak tears before, by not being able to shed then one tear—­and yet they were forbearing—­and no voice said ‘You have done this.’

Do not notice what I have written to you, my dearest friend.  I have never said so much to a living being—­I never could speak or write of it.  I asked no question from the moment when my last hope went:  and since then, it has been impossible for me to speak what was in me.  I have borne to do it to-day and to you, but perhaps if you were to write—­so do not let this be noticed between us again—­do not!  And besides there is no need!  I do not reproach myself with such acrid thoughts as I had once—­I know that I would have died ten times over for him, and that therefore though it was wrong of me to be weak, and I have suffered for it and shall learn by it I hope; remorse is not precisely the word for me—­not at least in its full sense.  Still you will comprehend from what I have told you how the spring of life must have seemed to break within me then; and how natural it has been for me to loathe the living on—­and to lose faith (even without the loathing), to lose faith in myself ... which I have done on some points utterly.  It is not from the cause of illness—­no.  And you will comprehend too that I have strong reasons for being grateful to the forbearance....  It would have been cruel, you think, to reproach me.  Perhaps so! yet the kindness and patience of the desisting from reproach, are positive things all the same.

Shall I be too late for the post, I wonder?  Wilson tells me that you were followed up-stairs yesterday (I write on Saturday this latter part) by somebody whom you probably took for my father.  Which is Wilson’s idea—­and I hope not yours.  No—­it was neither father nor other relative of mine, but an old friend in rather an ill temper.

And so good-bye until Tuesday.  Perhaps I shall ... not ... hear from you to-night.  Don’t let the tragedy or aught else do you harm—­will you? and try not to be ‘weary in your soul’ any more—­and forgive me this gloomy letter I half shrink from sending you, yet will send.

May God bless you.

E.B.B.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Wednesday Morning,
[Post-mark, August 27, 1845.]