if you COULD tell me when I next sit by you—­’I will undeceive you,—­I am not the Miss B.—­she is up-stairs and you shall see her—­I only wrote those letters, and am what you see, that is all now left you’ (all the misapprehension having arisen from me, in some inexplicable way) ...  I should not begin by saying anything, dear, dearest—­but after that, I should assure you—­soon make you believe that I did not much wonder at the event, for I have been all my life asking what connection there is between the satisfaction at the display of power, and the sympathy with—­ever-increasing sympathy with—­all imaginable weakness?  Look now:  Coleridge writes on and on,—­at last he writes a note to his ‘War-Eclogue,’ in which he avers himself to have been actuated by a really—­on the whole—­benevolent feeling to Mr. Pitt when he wrote that stanza in which ‘Fire’ means to ’cling to him everlastingly’—­where is the long line of admiration now that the end snaps?  And now—­here I refuse to fancy—­you KNOW whether, if you never write another line, speak another intelligible word, recognize me by a look again—­whether I shall love you less or more ...  MORE; having a right to expect more strength with the strange emergency.  And it is because I know this, build upon this entirely, that as a reasonable creature, I am bound to look first to what hangs farthest and most loosely from me ... what might go from you to your loss, and so to mine, to say the least ... because I want ALL of you, not just so much as I could not live without—­and because I see the danger of your entirely generous disposition and cannot quite, yet, bring myself to profit by it in the quiet way you recommend.  Always remember, I never wrote to you, all the years, on the strength of your poetry, though I constantly heard of you through Mr. K. and was near seeing you once, and might have easily availed myself of his intervention to commend any letter to your notice, so as to reach you out of the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius ... who come and eat their bread and cheese on the high-altar, and talk of reverence without one of its surest instincts—­never quiet till they cut their initials on the cheek of the Medicean Venus to prove they worship her.  My admiration, as I said, went its natural way in silence—­but when on my return to England in December, late in the month, Mr. K. sent those Poems to my sister, and I read my name there—­and when, a day or two after, I met him and, beginning to speak my mind on them, and getting on no better than I should now, said quite naturally—­’if I were to write this, now?’—­and he assured me with his perfect kindness, you would be even ‘pleased’ to hear from me under those circumstances ... nay,—­for I will tell you all, in this, in everything—­when he wrote me a note soon after to reassure me on that point ...  THEN I did write, on account of my purely personal obligation, though of course