Oh—­and I had a field-mouse for a pet once, and should have joined my sisters in a rat’s nest if I had not been ill at the time (as it was, the little rats were tenderly smothered by over-love!):  and blue-bottle flies I used to feed, and hated your spiders for them; yet no, not much.  My aversion proper ... call it horror rather ... was for the silent, cold, clinging, gliding bat; and even now, I think, I could not sleep in the room with that strange bird-mouse-creature, as it glides round the ceiling silently, silently as its shadow does on the floor.  If you listen or look, there is not a wave of the wing—­the wing never waves!  A bird without a feather! a beast that flies! and so cold! as cold as a fish!  It is the most supernatural-seeming of natural things.  And then to see how when the windows are open at night those bats come sailing ... without a sound—­and go ... you cannot guess where!—­fade with the night-blackness!

You have not been well—­which is my first thought if not my first word.  Do walk, and do not work; and think ... what I could be thinking of, if I did not think of you ... dear—­dearest!  ’As the doves fly to the windows,’ so I think of you!  As the prisoners think of liberty, as the dying think of Heaven, so I think of you.  When I look up straight to God ... nothing, no one, used to intercept me—­now there is you—­only you under him!  Do not use such words as those therefore any more, nor say that you are not to be thought of so and so.  You are to be thought of every way.  You must know what you are to me if you know at all what I am,—­and what I should be but for you.

So ... love me a little, with the spiders and the toads and the lizards! love me as you love the efts—­and I will believe in you as you believe ... in AElian—­Will that do?

Your own—­

Say how you are when you write—­and write.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Tuesday Morning.

I this minute receive the Review—­a poor business, truly!  Is there a reason for a man’s wits dwindling the moment he gets into a critical High-place to hold forth?—­I have only glanced over the article however.  Well, one day I am to write of you, dearest, and it must come to something rather better than that!

I am forced to send now what is to be sent at all.  Bless you, dearest.  I am trusting to hear from you—­

Your R.B.

And I find by a note from a fairer friend and favourer of mine that in the New Quarterly ‘Mr. Browning’ figures pleasantly as ’one without any sympathy for a human being!’—­Then, for newts and efts at all events!

R.B. to E.B.B.

Tuesday Night.
[Post-mark, January 7, 1846.]