of yesterday!  These letters are as good as Milton’s picture for convicting and putting to shame.  Is not the difference between the men of our day and ‘the giants which were on the earth,’ less ... far less ... in the faculty ... in the gift, ... or in the general intellect, ... than in the stature of the soul itself?  Our inferiority is not in what we can do, but in what we are.  We should write poems like Milton if [we] lived them like Milton.

I write all this just to show, I suppose, that I am not industrious as you did me the honour of apprehending that I was going to be ... packing trunks perhaps ... or what else in the way of ’active usefulness.’

Say how you are—­will you?  And do take care, and walk and do what is good for you.  I shall be able to see you twice before I go.  And oh, this going!  Pray for me, dearest friend.  May God bless you.

E.B.B.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Thursday Morning.
[Post-mark, September 11, 1845.]

Here are your beautiful, and I am sure true sonnets; they look true—­I remember the light hair, I find.  And who paints, and dares exhibit, E.B.B.’s self?  And surely ‘Alfred’s’ pencil has not foregone its best privilege, not left the face unsketched?  Italians call such an ‘effect defective’—­’l’andar a Roma senza vedere il Papa.’  He must have begun by seeing his Holiness, I know, and ... he will not trust me with the result, that my sister may copy it for me, because we are strangers, he and I, and I could give him nothing, nothing like the proper price for it—­but you would lend it to me, I think, nor need I do more than thank you in my usual effective and very eloquent way—­for I have already been allowed to visit you seventeen times, do you know; and this last letter of yours, fiftieth is the same!  So all my pride is gone, pride in that sense—­and I mean to take of you for ever, and reconcile myself with my lot in this life.  Could, and would, you give me such a sketch?  It has been on my mind to ask you ever since I knew you if nothing in the way of good portrait existed—­and this occasion bids me speak out, I dare believe:  the more, that you have also quieted—­have you not?—­another old obstinate and very likely impertinent questioning of mine—­as to the little name which was neither Orinda, nor Sacharissa (for which thank providence) and is never to appear in books, though you write them.  Now I know it and write it—­’Ba’—­and thank you, and your brother George, and only burned his kind letter because you bade me who know best.  So, wish by wish, one gets one’s wishes—­at least I do—­for one instance, you will go to Italy

[Illustration:  Music followed by ?]

Why, ‘lean and harken after it’ as Donne says—­