Think of my talking so as if I could be vexed with any one of them! I!—­On the contrary I wish them all a happy new year to abuse one another, or visit each of them his nearest neighbour whom he hates, three times a week, because ‘the distance is so convenient,’ and give great dinners in noble rivalship (venison from the Lord Lieutenant against turbot from London!), and talk popularity and game-law by turns to the tenantry, and beat down tithes to the rector.  This glorious England of ours; with its peculiar glory of the rural districts!  And my glory of patriotic virtue, who am so happy in spite of it all, and make a pretence of talking—­talking—­while I think the whole time of your letter.  I think of your letter—­I am no more a patriot than that!

May God bless you, best and dearest!  You say things to me which I am not worthy to listen to for a moment, even if I was deaf dust the next moment....  I confess it humbly and earnestly as before God.

Yet He knows,—­if the entireness of a gift means anything,—­that I have not given with a reserve, that I am yours in my life and soul, for this year and for other years.  Let me be used for you rather than against you! and that unspeakable, immeasurable grief of feeling myself a stone in your path, a cloud in your sky, may I be saved from it!—­pray it for me ... for my sake rather than yours.  For the rest, I thank you, I thank you.  You will be always to me, what to-day you are—­and that is all!—!

I am your own—­

R.B. to E.B.B.

Sunday Night.
[Post-mark, January 5, 1846.]

Yesterday, nearly the last thing, I bade you ’think of me’—­I wonder if you could misunderstand me in that?—­As if my words or actions or any of my ineffectual outside-self should be thought of, unless to be forgiven!  But I do, dearest, feel confident that while I am in your mind—­cared for, rather than thought about—­no great harm can happen to me; and as, for great harm to reach me, it must pass through you, you will care for yourself; myself, best self!

Come, let us talk.  I found Horne’s book at home, and have had time to see that fresh beautiful things are there—­I suppose ‘Delora’ will stand alone still—­but I got pleasantly smothered with that odd shower of wood-spoils at the end, the dwarf-story; cup-masses and fern and spotty yellow leaves,—­all that, I love heartily—­and there is good sailor-speech in the ’Ben Capstan’—­though he does knock a man down with a ’crow-bar’—­instead of a marling-spike or, even, a belaying-pin!  The first tale, though good, seems least new and individual, but I must know more.  At one thing I wonder—­his not reprinting a quaint clever real ballad, published before ‘Delora,’ on the ’Merry Devil of Edmonton’—­the first of his works I ever read.  No, the very first piece was a single stanza, if I remember, in which was this line:  ’When bason-crested Quixote, lean