Wednesday Morning.
[Post-mark, September 17, 1845.]

I write one word just to say that it is all over with Pisa; which was a probable evil when I wrote last, and which I foresaw from the beginning—­being a prophetess, you know.  I cannot tell you now how it has all happened—­only do not blame me, for I have kept my ground to the last, and only yield when Mr. Kenyon and all the world see that there is no standing.  I am ashamed almost of having put so much earnestness into a personal matter—­and I spoke face to face and quite firmly—­so as to pass with my sisters for the ’bravest person in the house’ without contestation.

Sometimes it seems to me as if it could not end so—­I mean, that the responsibility of such a negative must be reconsidered ... and you see how Mr. Kenyon writes to me.  Still, as the matter lies, ... no Pisa!  And, as I said before, my prophetic instincts are not likely to fail, such as they have been from the beginning.

If you wish to come, it must not be until Saturday at soonest.  I have a headache and am weary at heart with all this vexation—­and besides there is no haste now:  and when you do come, if you do, I will trust to you not to recur to one subject, which must lie where it fell ... must!  I had begun to write to you on Saturday, to say how I had forgotten to give you your MSS. which were lying ready for you ... the Hood poems.  Would it not be desirable that you made haste to see them through the press, and went abroad with your Roman friends at once, to try to get rid of that uneasiness in the head?  Do think of it—­and more than think.

For me, you are not to fancy me unwell.  Only, not to be worn a little with the last week’s turmoil, were impossible—­and Mr. Kenyon said to me yesterday that he quite wondered how I could bear it at all, do anything reasonable at all, and confine my misdoings to sending letters addressed to him at Brighton, when he was at Dover!  If anything changes, you shall hear from—­

E.B.B.

Mr. Kenyon returns to Dover immediately.  His kindness is impotent in the case.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Wednesday Evening.
[Post-mark, September 18, 1845.]

But one word before we leave the subject, and then to leave it finally; but I cannot let you go on to fancy a mystery anywhere, in obstacles or the rest.  You deserve at least a full frankness; and in my letter I meant to be fully frank.  I even told you what was an absurdity, so absurd that I should far rather not have told you at all, only that I felt the need of telling you all:  and no mystery is involved in that, except as an ‘idiosyncrasy’ is a mystery.  But the ‘insurmountable’ difficulty is for you and everybody to see; and for me to feel, who have been a very byword among the talkers, for a confirmed invalid through months and years, and who, even if I were going to Pisa and had the best prospects possible to me, should yet remain liable to relapses and stand on precarious ground to the end of my life.  Now that is no mystery for the trying of ‘faith’; but a plain fact, which neither thinking nor speaking can make less a fact.  But don’t let us speak of it.