which is worth all the journalizing and pamphleteering in the world!—­and then, the last ‘Thought’ which is quite to be grudged to that place of fragments ... those grand sea-sights in the long lines.  Should not these fragments be severed otherwise than by numbers?  The last stanza but one of the ‘Lost Mistress’ seemed obscure to me.  Is it so really?  The end you have put to ‘England in Italy’ gives unity to the whole ... just what the poem wanted.  Also you have given some nobler lines to the middle than met me there before.  ‘The Duchess’ appears to me more than ever a new-minted golden coin—­the rhythm of it answering to your own description, ‘Speech half asleep, or song half awake?’ You have right of trove to these novel effects of rhythm.  Now if people do not cry out about these poems, what are we to think of the world?

May God bless you always—­send me the next proof in any case.

Your

E.B.B.

R.B. to E.B.B.

[Post-mark, October 23, 1845.]

But I must answer you, and be forgiven, too, dearest.  I was (to begin at the beginning) surely not ‘startled’ ... only properly aware of the deep blessing I have been enjoying this while, and not disposed to take its continuance as pure matter of course, and so treat with indifference the first shadow of a threatening intimation from without, the first hint of a possible abstraction from the quarter to which so many hopes and fears of mine have gone of late.  In this case, knowing you, I was sure that if any imaginable form of displeasure could touch you without reaching me, I should not hear of it too soon—­so I spoke—­so you have spoken—­and so now you get ‘excused’?  No—­wondered at, with all my faculty of wonder for the strange exalting way you will persist to think of me; now, once for all, I will not pass for what I make no least pretence to.  I quite understand the grace of your imaginary self-denial, and fidelity to a given word, and noble constancy; but it all happens to be none of mine, none in the least.  I love you because I love you; I see you ‘once a week’ because I cannot see you all day long; I think of you all day long, because I most certainly could not think of you once an hour less, if I tried, or went to Pisa, or ‘abroad’ (in every sense) in order to ‘be happy’ ... a kind of adventure which you seem to suppose you have in some way interfered with.  Do, for this once, think, and never after, on the impossibility of your ever (you know I must talk your own language, so I shall say—­) hindering any scheme of mine, stopping any supposable advancement of mine.  Do you really think that before I found you, I was going about the world seeking whom I might devour, that is, be devoured by, in the shape of a wife ... do you suppose I ever dreamed of marrying?  What would it mean for me, with my life I am hardened in—­considering the rational chances; how the land is used to furnish its contingent of Shakespeare’s women:  or by ‘success,’ ‘happiness’ &c. &c. you never never can be seeing for a moment with the world’s eyes and meaning ‘getting rich’ and all that?  Yet, put that away, and what do you meet at every turn, if you are hunting about in the dusk to catch my good, but yourself?