Is not this an infinite letter?  I shall hear from you, I hope....  I ask you to let me hear soon.  I write all sorts of things to you, rightly and wrongly perhaps; when wrongly forgive it.  I think of you always.  May God bless you.  ‘Love me for ever,’ as

Your

Ba

R.B. to E.B.B.

25th Dec. [1845.]

My dear Christmas gift of a letter!  I will write back a few lines, (all I can, having to go out now)—­just that I may forever,—­certainly during our mortal ’forever’—­mix my love for you, and, as you suffer me to say, your love for me ... dearest! ... these shall be mixed with the other loves of the day and live therein—­as I write, and trust, and know—­forever!  While I live I will remember what was my feeling in reading, and in writing, and in stopping from either ... as I have just done ... to kiss you and bless you with my whole heart.—­Yes, yes, bless you, my own!

All is right, all of your letter ... admirably right and just in the defence of the women I seemed to speak against; and only seemed—­because that is a way of mine which you must have observed; that foolish concentrating of thought and feeling, for a moment, on some one little spot of a character or anything else indeed, and in the attempt to do justice and develop whatever may seem ordinarily to be overlooked in it,—­that over vehement insisting on, and giving an undue prominence to, the same—­which has the effect of taking away from the importance of the rest of the related objects which, in truth, are not considered at all ... or they would also rise proportionally when subjected to the same (that is, correspondingly magnified and dilated) light and concentrated feeling.  So, you remember, the old divine, preaching on ‘small sins,’ in his zeal to expose the tendencies and consequences usually made little account of, was led to maintain the said small sins to be ’greater than great ones.’ But then ... if you look on the world altogether, and accept the small natures, in their usual proportion with the greater ... things do not look quite so bad; because the conduct which is atrocious in those higher cases, of proposal and acceptance, may be no more than the claims of the occasion justify (wait and hear) in certain other cases where the thing sought for and granted is avowedly less by a million degrees.  It shall all be traffic, exchange (counting spiritual gifts as only coin, for our purpose), but surely the formalities and policies and decencies all vary with the nature of the thing trafficked for.  If a man makes up his mind during half his life to acquire a Pitt-diamond or a Pilgrim-pearl—­[he] gets witnesses and testimony and so forth—­but, surely, when I pass a shop where oranges are ticketed up seven for sixpence I offend no law by sparing all words and putting down the piece with a certain authoritative ring on the counter.  If instead of diamonds you