God bless you and all you love! dearest, I am your

R.B.

E.B.B. to R.B.

                              Saturday.
                              [Post-mark, October 14, 1845.]

It was the merest foolishness in me to write about fevers and the rest as I did to-day, just as if it could do any good, all the wringing of hands in the world.  And there is no typhus yet ... and no danger of any sort I hope and trust!—­and how weak it is that habit of spreading the cloud which is in you all around you, how weak and selfish ... and unlike what you would do ... just as you are unlike Mr. Kenyon.  And you are unlike him—­and you were right on Thursday when you said so, and I was wrong in setting up a phrase on the other side ... only what I said came by an instinct because you seemed to be giving him all the sunshine to use and carry, which should not be after all.  But you are unlike him and must be ... seeing that the producers must differ from the ‘nati consumere fruges’ in the intellectual as in the material.  You create and he enjoys, and the work makes you pale and the pleasure makes him ruddy, and it is so of a necessity.  So differs the man of genius from the man of letters—­and then dear Mr. Kenyon is not even a man of letters in a full sense ... he is rather a Sybarite of letters.  Do you think he ever knew what mental labour is?  I fancy not.  Not more than he has known what mental inspiration is!  And not more than he has known what the strife of the heart is ... with all his tenderness and sensibility.  He seems to me to evade pain, and where he suffers at all to do so rather negatively than positively ... if you understand what I mean by that ... rather by a want than by a blow:  the secret of all being that he has a certain latitudinarianism (not indifferentism) in his life and affections, and has no capacity for concentration and intensity.  Partly by temperament and partly by philosophy he contrives to keep the sunny side of the street—­though never inclined to forget the blind man at the corner.  Ah, dear Mr. Kenyon:  he is magnanimous in toleration, and excellent in sympathy—­and he has the love of beauty and the reverence of genius—­but the faculty of worship he has not:  he will not worship aright either your heroes or your gods ... and while you do it he only ‘tolerates’ the act in you.  Once he said ... not to me ... but I heard of it:  ‘What, if genius should be nothing but scrofula?’ and he doubts (I very much fear) whether the world is not governed by a throw of those very same ‘loaded dice,’ and no otherwise.  Yet he reveres genius in the acting of it, and recognizes a God in creation—­only it is but ‘so far,’ and not farther.  At least I think not—­and I have a right to think what I please of him, holding him as I do, in such true affection.  One of the kindest and most indulgent of human beings has he been to me, and I am happy to be grateful to him.