your motives and pure perfect generosity.  It was the plainness of that which determined me to wait and be patient and grateful and your own for ever in any shape or capacity you might please to accept.  Do you think that because I am so rich now, I could not have been most rich, too, then—­in what would seem little only to me, only with this great happiness?  I should have been proud beyond measure—­happy past all desert, to call and be allowed to see you simply, speak with you and be spoken to—­what am I more than others?  Don’t think this mock humility—­it is not—­you take me in your mantle, and we shine together, but I know my part in it!  All this is written breathlessly on a sudden fancy that you might—­if not now, at some future time—­give other than this, the true reason, for that discrepancy you see, that nearness in the letters, that early farness in the visits!  And, love, all love is but a passionate drawing closer—­I would be one with you, dearest; let my soul press close to you, as my lips, dear life of my life.

Wednesday.—­You are entirely right about those poems of Horne’s—­I spoke only of the effect of the first glance, and it is a principle with me to begin by welcoming any strangeness, intention of originality in men—­the other way of safe copying precedents being so safe!  So I began by praising all that was at all questionable in the form ... reserving the ground-work for after consideration.  The Elf-story turns out a pure mistake, I think—­and a common mistake, too.  Fairy stories, the good ones, were written for men and women, and, being true, pleased also children; now, people set about writing for children and miss them and the others too,—­with that detestable irreverence and plain mocking all the time at the very wonder they profess to want to excite.  All obvious bending down to the lower capacity, determining not to be the great complete man one is, by half; any patronizing minute to be spent in the nursery over the books and work and healthful play, of a visitor who will presently bid good-bye and betake himself to the Beefsteak Club—­keep us from all that!  The Sailor Language is good in its way; but as wrongly used in Art as real clay and mud would be, if one plastered them in the foreground of a landscape in order to attain to so much truth, at all events—­the true thing to endeavour is the making a golden colour which shall do every good in the power of the dirty brown.  Well, then, what a veering weathercock am I, to write so and now, so!  Not altogether,—­for first it was but the stranger’s welcome I gave, the right of every new comer who must stand or fall by his behaviour once admitted within the door.  And then—­when I know what Horne thinks of—­you, dearest; how he knew you first, and from the soul admired you; and how little he thinks of my good fortune ...  I could NOT begin by giving you a bad impression of anything he sends—­he