not secure any occasion of making clear one of the less important points that arise in our intercourse ... if I fancy I can do it with the least success.  For instance, it is on my mind to explain what I meant yesterday by trusting that the entire happiness I feel in the letters, and the help in the criticising might not be hurt by the surmise, even, that those labours to which you were born, might be suspended, in any degree, through such generosity to me.  Dearest, I believed in your glorious genius and knew it for a true star from the moment I saw it; long before I had the blessing of knowing it was MY star, with my fortune and futurity in it.  And, when I draw back from myself, and look better and more clearly, then I do feel, with you, that the writing a few letters more or less, reading many or few rhymes of any other person, would not interfere in any material degree with that power of yours—­that you might easily make one so happy and yet go on writing ‘Geraldines’ and ’Berthas’—­but—­how can I, dearest, leave my heart’s treasures long, even to look at your genius?... and when I come back and find all safe, find the comfort of you, the traces of you ... will it do—­tell me—­to trust all that as a light effort, an easy matter?

Yet, if you can lift me with one hand, while the other suffices to crown you—­there is queenliness in that, too!

Well, I have spoken.  As I told you, your turn comes now.  How have you determined respecting the American Edition?  You tell me nothing of yourself!  It is all ME you help, me you do good to ... and I take it all!  Now see, if this goes on!  I have not had every love-luxury, I now find out ... where is the proper, rationally to-be-expected—­’lovers’ quarrel’? Here, as you will find!  ’Irae; amantium’....  I am no more ‘at a loss with my Naso,’ than Peter Ronsard.  Ah, but then they are to be reintegratio amoris—­and to get back into a thing, one must needs get for a moment first out of it ... trust me, no!  And now, the natural inference from all this?  The consistent inference ... the ‘self-denying ordinance’?  Why—­do you doubt? even this,—­you must just put aside the Romance, and tell the Americans to wait, and make my heart start up when the letter is laid to it; the letter full of your news, telling me you are well and walking, and working for my sake towards the time—­informing me, moreover, if Thursday or Friday is to be my day—.

May God bless you, my own love.

I will certainly bring you an Act of the Play ... for this serpent’s reason, in addition to the others ... that—­No, I will tell you that—­I can tell you now more than even lately!

Ever your own

R.B.

[Illustration:  FACSIMILE OF LETTER OF ROBERT BROWNING

(See Vol.  I., p. 270)]

E.B.B. to R.B.

Monday.
[Post-mark, November 11, 1845.]

If it were possible that you could do me harm in the way of work, (but it isn’t) it would be possible, not through writing letters and reading manuscripts, but because of a reason to be drawn from your own great line