Wednesday.—­In the meantime I had a letter from you yesterday, and am promised another to-day.  How ...  I was going to say ‘kind’ and pull down the thunders ... how unkind ... will that do? ... how good you are to me—­how dear you must be!  Dear—­dearest—­if I feel that you love me, can I help it if, without any other sort of certain knowledge, the world grows lighter round me? being but a mortal woman, can I help it? no—­certainly.

I comfort myself by thinking sometimes that I can at least understand you, ... comprehend you in what you are and in what you possess and combine; and that, if doing this better than others who are better otherwise than I, I am, so far, worthier of the ...  I mean that to understand you is something, and that I account it something in my own favour ... mine.

Yet when you tell me that I ought to know some things, though untold, you are wrong, and speak what is impossible.  My imagination sits by the roadside [Greek:  apedilos] like the startled sea nymph in AEschylus, but never dares to put one unsandalled foot, unbidden, on a certain tract of ground—­never takes a step there unled! and never (I write the simple truth) even as the alternative of the probability of your ceasing to care for me, have I touched (untold) on the possibility of your caring more for me ... never!  That you should continue to care, was the utmost of what I saw in that direction.  So, when you spoke of a ‘strengthened feeling,’ judge how I listened with my heart—­judge!

‘Luria’ is very great.  You will avenge him with the sympathies of the world; that, I foresee....  And for the rest, it is a magnanimity which grows and grows, and which will, of a worldly necessity, fall by its own weight at last; nothing less being possible.  The scene with Tiburzio and the end of the act with its great effects, are more pathetic than professed pathos.  When I come to criticise, it will be chiefly on what I take to be a little occasional flatness in the versification, which you may remove if you please, by knotting up a few lines here and there.  But I shall write more of ’Luria,’—­and well remember in the meanwhile, that you wanted smoothness, you said.

May God bless you.  I shall have the letter to-night, I think gladly.  Yes,—­I thought of the greater safety from ’comment’—­it is best in every way.

I lean on you and trust to you, and am always, as to one who is all to me,

Your own—­

E.B.B. to R.B.

[Post-mark, December 4, 1845.]

Why of course I am pleased—­I should have been pleased last year, for the vanity’s sake of being reviewed in your company.  Now, as far as that vice of vanity goes ... shall I tell you?...  I would infinitely prefer to see you set before the public in your own right solitude, and supremacy, apart from me or any one else, ... this, as far as my vice of vanity goes, ... and because, vainer I