And when unreasonableness stands for a reason, it is a promising state of things, we may both admit, and proves what it would be as well not too curiously to enquire into.  But then ... to look at it in a brighter aspect, ...  I do remember how, years ago, when talking the foolishnesses which women will talk when they are by themselves, and not forced to be sensible, ... one of my friends thought it ’safest to begin with a little aversion,’ and another, wisest to begin with a great deal of esteem, and how the best attachments were produced so and so, ...  I took it into my head to say that the best was where there was no cause at all for it, and the more wholly unreasonable, the better still; that the motive should lie in the feeling itself and not in the object of it—­and that the affection which could (if it could) throw itself out on an idiot with a goitre would be more admirable than Abelard’s.  Whereupon everybody laughed, and someone thought it affected of me and no true opinion, and others said plainly that it was immoral, and somebody else hoped, in a sarcasm, that I meant to act out my theory for the advantage of the world.  To which I replied quite gravely that I had not virtue enough—­and so, people laughed as it is fair to laugh when other people are esteemed to talk nonsense.  And all this came back to me in the south wind of your ‘parceque,’ and I tell it as it came ... now.

Which proves, if it proves anything, ... while I have every sort of natural pleasure in your praises and like you to like my poetry just as I should, and perhaps more than I should; yet why it is all behind ... and in its place—­and why I have a tendency moreover to sift and measure any praise of yours and to separate it from the superfluities, far more than with any other person’s praise in the world.

Friday evening.—­Shall I send this letter or not?  I have been ’tra ’l si e ‘l no,’ and writing a new beginning on a new sheet even—­but after all you ought to hear the remote echo of your last letter ... far out among the hills, ... as well as the immediate reverberation, and so I will send it,—­and what I send is not to be answered, remember!

I read Luria’s first act twice through before I slept last night, and feel just as a bullet might feel, not because of the lead of it but because shot into the air and suddenly arrested and suspended.  It (’Luria’) is all life, and we know (that is, the reader knows) that there must be results here and here.  How fine that sight of Luria is upon the lynx hides—­how you see the Moor in him just in the glimpse you have by the eyes of another—­and that laugh when the horse drops the forage, what wonderful truth and character you have in that!—­And then, when he is in the scene—­:  ‘Golden-hearted Luria’ you called him once to me, and his heart shines already ... wide open to the morning sun.  The construction seems to me very clear everywhere—­and the rhythm, even over-smooth in a few verses, where you invert a little artificially—­but that shall be set down on a separate strip of paper:  and in the meantime I am snatched up into ‘Luria’ and feel myself driven on to the ends of the poet, just as a reader should.