There was no writing yesterday for me—­nor will there be much to-day.  In some moods, you know, I turn and take a thousand new views of what you say ... and find fault with you to your surprise—­at others, I rest on you, and feel all well, all best ... now, for one instance, even that phrase of the possibility ’and what is to follow,’—­even that I cannot except against—­I am happy, contented; too well, too prodigally blessed to be even able to murmur just sufficiently loud to get, in addition to it all, a sweetest stopping of the mouth!  I will say quietly and becomingly ’Yes—­I do promise you’—­yet it is some solace to—­No—­I will not even couple the promise with an adjuration that you, at the same time, see that they care for me properly at Hanwell Asylum ... the best by all accounts:  yet I feel so sure of you, so safe and confident in you!  If any of it had been my work, my own ... distrust and foreboding had pursued me from the beginning; but all is yours—­you crust me round with gold and jewelry like the wood of a sceptre; and why should you transfer your own work?  Wood enough to choose from in the first instance, but the choice once made!...  So I rest on you, for life, for death, beloved—­beside you do stand, in my solemn belief, the direct miraculous gift of God to me—­that is my solemn belief; may I be thankful!

I am anxious to hear from you ... when am I not?—­but not before the American letter is written and sent.  Is that done?  And who was the visitor on Monday—­and if &c. what did he remark?—­And what is right or wrong with Saturday—­is it to be mine?

Bless you, dearest—­now and for ever—­words cannot say how much I am your own.

E.B.B. to R.B.

                              Tuesday Evening.
                              [Post-mark, December 4, 1845.]

No Mr. Kenyon after all—­not yesterday, not to-day; and the knock at the door belonged perhaps to the post, which brought me a kind letter from Mrs. Jameson to ask how I was, and if she might come—­but she won’t come on Saturday....  I shall ’provide’—­she may as well (and better) come on a free day.  On the other side, are you sure that Mr. Procter may not stretch out his hand and seize on Saturday (he was to dine with you, you said), or that some new engagement may not start up suddenly in the midst of it?  I trust to you, in such a case, to alter our arrangement, without a second thought.  Monday stands close by, remember, and there’s a Saturday to follow Monday ... and I should understand at a word, or apart from a word.

Just as you understand how to ‘take me with guile,’ when you tell me that anything in me can have any part in making you happy ... you, who can say such words and call them ‘vain words.’  Ah, well!  If I only knew certainly, ... more certainly than the thing may be known by either me or you, ... that nothing in me could have any part in making you unhappy, ... ah, would it not be enough ... that knowledge ... to content me, to overjoy me? but that lies too high and out of reach, you see, and one can’t hope to get at it except by the ladder Jacob saw, and which an archangel helped to hide away behind the gate of Heaven afterwards.