I call it for a motive base and small enough?) my own scrupulousness ... freedom from embarrassment! of myself in the least of me; in the tying of my shoestrings, say!—­so much and no more!  Now this is so wrong, as to make me impatient sometimes in feeling it to be your impression:  I asked for silence—­but also and chiefly for the putting away of ... you know very well what I asked for.  And this was sincerely done, I attest to you.  You wrote once to me ... oh, long before May and the day we met:  that you ’had been so happy, you should be now justified to yourself in taking any step most hazardous to the happiness of your life’—­but if you were justified, could I be therefore justified in abetting such a step,—­the step of wasting, in a sense, your best feelings ... of emptying your water gourds into the sand?  What I thought then I think now—­just what any third person, knowing you, would think, I think and feel.  I thought too, at first, that the feeling on your part was a mere generous impulse, likely to expand itself in a week perhaps.  It affects me and has affected me, very deeply, more than I dare attempt to say, that you should persist so—­and if sometimes I have felt, by a sort of instinct, that after all you would not go on to persist, and that (being a man, you know) you might mistake, a little unconsciously, the strength of your own feeling; you ought not to be surprised; when I felt it was more advantageous and happier for you that it should be so. In any case, I shall never regret my own share in the events of this summer, and your friendship will be dear to me to the last.  You know I told you so—­not long since.  And as to what you say otherwise, you are right in thinking that I would not hold by unworthy motives in avoiding to speak what you had any claim to hear.  But what could I speak that would not be unjust to you?  Your life! if you gave it to me and I put my whole heart into it; what should I put but anxiety, and more sadness than you were born to?  What could I give you, which it would not be ungenerous to give?  Therefore we must leave this subject—­and I must trust you to leave it without one word more; (too many have been said already—­but I could not let your letter pass quite silently ... as if I had nothing to do but to receive all as matter of course so!) while you may well trust me to remember to my life’s end, as the grateful remember; and to feel, as those do who have felt sorrow (for where these pits are dug, the water will stand), the full price of your regard.  May God bless you, my dearest friend.  I shall send this letter after I have seen you, and hope you may not have expected to hear sooner.

Ever yours,

E.B.B.

Monday, 6 p.m.—­I send in disobedience to your commands, Mrs. Shelley’s book—­but when books accumulate and when besides, I want to let you have the American edition of my poems ... famous for all manner of blunders, you know; what is to be done but have recourse to the parcel-medium?  You were in jest about being at Pisa before or as soon as we were?—­oh no—­that must not be indeed—­we must wait a little!—­even if you determine to go at all, which is a question of doubtful expediency.  Do take more exercise, this week, and make war against those dreadful sensations in the head—­now, will you?