That you really are better is the best news of all—­thank you for telling me.  It will be wise not to go out too much—­’aequam servare mentem’ as Landor quotes, ... in this as in the rest.  Perhaps that worst pain was a sort of crisis ... the sharp turn of the road about to end ... oh, I do trust it may be so.

Mr. K. wrote to Landor to the effect that it was not because he (Mr. K.) held you in affection, nor because the verses expressed critically the opinion entertained of you by all who could judge, nor because they praised a book with which his own name was associated ... but for the abstract beauty of those verses ... for that reason he could not help naming them to Mr. Landor.  All of which was repeated to me yesterday.

Also I heard of you from George, who admired you—­admired you ... as if you were a chancellor in posse, a great lawyer in esse—­and then he thought you ... what he never could think a lawyer ... ‘unassuming.’  And you ... you are so kind!  Only that makes me think bitterly what I have thought before, but cannot write to-day.

It was good-natured of Mr. Chorley to send me a copy of his book, and he sending so few—­very!  George who admires you, does not tolerate Mr. Chorley ... (did I tell ever?) declares that the affectation is ‘bad,’ and that there is a dash of vulgarity ... which I positively refuse to believe, and should, I fancy, though face to face with the most vainglorious of waistcoats.  How can there be vulgarity even of manners, with so much mental refinement?  I never could believe in those combinations of contradictions.

‘An obvious matter,’ you think! as obvious, as your ‘green hill’ ... which I cannot see.  For the rest ... my thought upon your ’great fact’ of the ‘two days,’ is quite different from yours ... for I think directly, ‘So little’! so dreadfully little!  What shallow earth for a deep root!  What can be known of me in that time?  ’So there, is the only good, you see, that comes from making calculations on a slip of paper!  It is not and it cannot come to good.’  I would rather look at my seventy-five letters—­there is room to breathe in them.  And this is my idea (ecce!) of monumental brevity—­and hic jacet at last

Your E.B.B.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Sunday Night.
[Post-mark, November 24, 1845.]

But a word to-night, my love—­for my head aches a little,—­I had to write a long letter to my friend at New Zealand, and now I want to sit and think of you and get well—­but I must not quite lose the word I counted on.

So, that way you will take my two days and turn them against me? Oh, you! Did I say the ‘root’ had been striking then, or rather, that the seeds, whence the roots take leisure and grow, they had been planted then—­and might not a good heart and hand drop acorns enough to grow up into a complete Dodona-grove,—­when the very rook, say farmers, hides and forgets whole navies of ship-wood one day to be, in his summer storing-journeys?  But this shall do—­I am not going to prove what may be, when here it is, to my everlasting happiness.