festivals, ‘in Orion.’  But now tell me if you like altogether ‘Ben Capstan’ and if you consider the sailor-idiom to be lawful in poetry, because I do not indeed.  On the same principle we may have Yorkshire and Somersetshire ‘sweet Doric’; and do recollect what it ended in of old, in the Blowsibella heroines.  Then for the Elf story ... why should such things be written by men like Mr. Horne?  I am vexed at it.  Shakespeare and Fletcher did not write so about fairies:—­Drayton did not.  Look at the exquisite ‘Nymphidia,’ with its subtle sylvan consistency, and then at the lumbering coarse ... ‘machina intersit’ ...  Grandmama Grey!—­to say nothing of the ’small dog’ that isn’t the ‘small boy.’  Mr. Horne succeeds better on a larger canvass, and with weightier material; with blank verse rather than lyrics.  He cannot make a fine stroke.  He wants subtlety and elasticity in the thought and expression.  Remember, I admire him honestly and earnestly.  No one has admired more than I the ‘Death of Marlowe,’ scenes in ‘Cosmo,’ and ‘Orion’ in much of it.  But now tell me if you can accept with the same stretched out hand all these lyrical poems?  I am going to write to him as much homage as can come truly.  Who combines different faculties as you do, striking the whole octave?  No one, at present in the world.

Dearest, after you went away yesterday and I began to consider, I found that there was nothing to be so over-glad about in the matter of the letters, for that, Sunday coming next to Saturday, the best now is only as good as the worst before, and I can’t hear from you, until Monday ...  Monday!  Did you think of that—­you who took the credit of acceding so meekly!  I shall not praise you in return at any rate.  I shall have to wait ... till what o’clock on Monday, tempted in the meanwhile to fall into controversy against the ’new moons and sabbath days’ and the pausing of the post in consequence.

You never guessed perhaps, what I look back to at this moment in the physiology of our intercourse, the curious double feeling I had about you—­you personally, and you as the writer of these letters, and the crisis of the feeling, when I was positively vexed and jealous of myself for not succeeding better in making a unity of the two.  I could not!  And moreover I could not help but that the writer of the letters seemed nearer to me, long ... long ... and in spite of the postmark, than did the personal visitor who confounded me, and left me constantly under such an impression of its being all dream-work on his side, that I have stamped my feet on this floor with impatience to think of having to wait so many hours before the ‘candid’ closing letter could come with its confessional of an illusion.  ‘People say,’ I used to think, ’that women always know, and certainly I do not know, and therefore ... therefore.’—­The logic crushed on like Juggernaut’s car.  But in the letters it was different—­the dear letters took me on the side of my own ideal life where I was able to stand a little upright and look round.  I could read such letters for ever and answer them after a fashion ... that, I felt from the beginning.  But you—!