Could you think that that untoward letter lived one moment after it returned to me?  I burned it and cried ‘serve it right’!  Poor letter,—­yet I should have been vexed and offended then to be told I could love you better than I did already.  ‘Live and learn!’ Live and love you—­dearest, as loves you

R.B.

You will write to reassure me about Saturday, if not for other reasons.  See your corrections ... and understand that in one or two instances in which they would seem not to be adopted, they are so, by some modification of the previous, or following line ... as in one of the Sorrento lines ... about a ’turret’—­see! (Can you give me Horne’s address—­I would send then.)

E.B.B. to R.B.

                              Thursday Evening.
                              [Post-mark, November 7, 1845.]

I see and know; read and mark; and only hope there is no harm done by my meddling; and lose the sense of it all in the sense of beauty and power everywhere, which nobody could kill, if they took to meddling more even.  And now, what will people say to this and this and this—­or ‘O seclum insipiens et inficetum!’ or rather, O ungrateful right hand which does not thank you first!  I do thank you.  I have been reading everything with new delight; and at intervals remembering in inglorious complacency (for which you must try to forgive me) that Mr. Forster is no longer anything like an enemy.  And yet (just see what contradiction!) the British Quarterly has been abusing me so at large, that I can only take it to be the achievement of a very particular friend indeed,—­of someone who positively never reviewed before and tries his new sword on me out of pure friendship.  Only I suppose it is not the general rule, and that there are friends ’with a difference.’  Not that you are to fancy me pained—­oh no!—­merely surprised.  I was prepared for anything almost from the quarter in question, but scarcely for being hung ‘to the crows’ so publicly ... though within the bounds of legitimate criticisms, mind.  But oh—­the creatures of your sex are not always magnanimous—­that is true.  And to put you between me and all ... the thought of you ... in a great eclipse of the world ... that is happy ... only, too happy for such as I am; as my own heart warns me hour by hour.

’Serve me right’—­I do not dare to complain.  I wished for the safety of that letter so much that I finished by persuading myself of the probability of it:  but ‘serve me right’ quite clearly.  And yet—­but no more ‘and yets’ about it.  ‘And yets’ fray the silk.