My best, dear, dear one,—­may you be better, less depressed, ...  I can hardly imagine frost reaching you if I could be by you.  Think what happiness you mean to give me,—­what a life; what a death!  ’I may change’—­too true; yet, you see, as an eft was to me at the beginning so it continues—­I may take up stones and pelt the next I see—­but—­do you much fear that?—­Now, walk, move, guizza, anima mia dolce.  Shall I not know one day how far your mouth will be from mine as we walk?  May I let that stay ... dearest, (the line stay, not the mouth)?

I am not very well to-day—­or, rather, have not been so—­now, I am well and with you.  I just say that, very needlessly, but for strict frankness’ sake.  Now, you are to write to me soon, and tell me all about your self, and to love me ever, as I love you ever, and bless you, and leave you in the hands of God—­My own love!—­

Tell me if I do wrong to send this by a morning post—­so as to reach you earlier than the evening—­when you will ... write to me?

Don’t let me forget to say that I shall receive the Review to-morrow, and will send it directly.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Sunday.
[Post-mark, January 6, 1846.]

When you get Mr. Horne’s book you will understand how, after reading just the first and the last poems, I could not help speaking coldly a little of it—­and in fact, estimating his power as much as you can do, I did think and do, that the last was unworthy of him, and that the first might have been written by a writer of one tenth of his faculty.  But last night I read the ‘Monk of Swineshead Abbey’ and the ’Three Knights of Camelott’ and ‘Bedd Gelert’ and found them all of different stuff, better, stronger, more consistent, and read them with pleasure and admiration.  Do you remember this application, among the countless ones of shadow to the transiency of life?  I give the first two lines for clearness—­

    Like to the cloud upon the hill
    We are a moment seen
    Or the shadow of the windmill-sail
    Across yon sunny slope of green.

New or not, and I don’t remember it elsewhere, it is just and beautiful I think.  Think how the shadow of the windmill-sail just touches the ground on a bright windy day! the shadow of a bird flying is not faster!  Then the ‘Three Knights’ has beautiful things, with more definite and distinct images than he is apt to show—­for his character is a vague grand massiveness,—­like Stonehenge—­or at least, if ‘towers and battlements he sees’ they are ‘bosomed high’ in dusky clouds ... it is a ‘passion-created imagery’ which has no clear outline.  In this ballad of the ‘Knights,’ and in the Monk’s too, we may look at things, as on the satyr who swears by his horns and mates not with his kind afterwards, ’While, holding beards, they dance in pairs—­and that is all excellent and reminds one of those fine sylvan