But you are not driven on to any ends? so as to be tired, I mean?  You will not suffer yourself to be overworked because you are ‘interested’ in this work.  I am so certain that the sensations in your head demand repose; and it must be so injurious to you to be perpetually calling, calling these new creations, one after another, that you must consent to be called to, and not hurry the next act, no, nor any act—­let the people have time to learn the last number by heart.  And how glad I am that Mr. Fox should say what he did of it ... though it wasn’t true, you know ... not exactly.  Still, I do hold that as far as construction goes, you never put together so much unquestionable, smooth glory before, ... not a single entanglement for the understanding ... unless ‘the snowdrops’ make an exception—­while for the undeniableness of genius it never stood out before your readers more plainly than in that same number!  Also you have extended your sweep of power—­the sea-weed is thrown farther (if not higher) than it was found before; and one may calculate surely now how a few more waves will cover the brown stones and float the sight up away through the fissure of the rocks.  The rhythm (to touch one of the various things) the rhythm of that ‘Duchess’ does more and more strike me as a new thing; something like (if like anything) what the Greeks called pedestrian-metre, ... between metre and prose ... the difficult rhymes combining too quite curiously with the easy looseness of the general measure.  Then ’The Ride’—­with that touch of natural feeling at the end, to prove that it was not in brutal carelessness that the poor horse was driven through all that suffering ... yes, and how that one touch of softness acts back upon the energy and resolution and exalts both, instead of weakening anything, as might have been expected by the vulgar of writers or critics.  And then ’Saul’—­and in a first place ’St. Praxed’—­and for pure description, ‘Fortu’ and the deep ’Pictor Ignotus’—­and the noble, serene ‘Italy in England,’ which grows on you the more you know of it—­and that delightful ’Glove’—­and the short lyrics ... for one comes to ’select’ everything at last, and certainly I do like these poems better and better, as your poems are made to be liked.  But you will be tired to hear it said over and over so, ... and I am going to ‘Luria,’ besides.

When you write will you say exactly how you are? and will you write?  And I want to explain to you that although I don’t make a profession of equable spirits, (as a matter of temperament, my spirits were always given to rock a little, up and down) yet that I did not mean to be so ungrateful and wicked as to complain of low spirits now and to you.  It would not be true either:  and I said ‘low’ to express a merely bodily state.  My opium comes in to keep the pulse from fluttering and fainting ... to give the right composure and point of balance to the nervous system.  I don’t take it