Tuesday is so near, as men count, that I caught myself just now being afraid lest the week should have no chance of appearing long to you!  Try to let it be long to you—­will you?  My consistency is wonderful.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Friday Morning.

As if I could deny you anything!  Here is the Review—­indeed it was foolish to mind your seeing it at all.  But now, may I stipulate?—­You shall not send it back—­but on your table I shall find and take it next Tuesday—­c’est convenu!  The other precious volume has not yet come to hand (nor to foot) all through your being so sure that to carry it home would have been the death of me last evening!

I cannot write my feelings in this large writing, begun on such a scale for the Review’s sake; and just now—­there is no denying it, and spite of all I have been incredulous about—­it does seem that the fact is achieved and that I do love you, plainly, surely, more than ever, more than any day in my life before.  It is your secret, the why, the how; the experience is mine.  What are you doing to me?—­in the heart’s heart.

Rest—­dearest—­bless you—­

E.B.B. to R.B.

                              Saturday.
                              [Post-mark, January 10, 1846.]

Kindest and dearest you are!—­that is ‘my secret’ and for the others, I leave them to you!—­only it is no secret that I should and must be glad to have the words you sent with the book,—­which I should have seen at all events be sure, whether you had sent it or not.  Should I not, do you think?  And considering what the present generation of critics really is, the remarks on you may stand, although it is the dreariest impotency to complain of the want of flesh and blood and of human sympathy in general.  Yet suffer them to say on—­it is the stamp on the critical knife.  There must be something eminently stupid, or farewell criticdom!  And if anything more utterly untrue could be said than another, it is precisely that saying, which Mr. Mackay stands up to catch the reversion of!  Do you indeed suppose that Heraud could have done this?  I scarcely can believe it, though some things are said rightly as about the ‘intellectuality,’ and how you stand first by the brain,—­which is as true as truth can be.  Then, I shall have ‘Pauline’ in a day or two—­yes, I shall and must, and will.

The ‘Ballad Poems and Fancies,’ the article calling itself by that name, seems indeed to be Mr. Chorley’s, and is one of his very best papers, I think.  There is to me a want of colour and thinness about his writings in general, with a grace and savoir faire nevertheless, and always a rightness and purity of intention.  Observe what he says of ‘many-sidedness’ seeming to trench on opinion and principle.  That, he means for himself I know, for he has said to me that through having such largeness of sympathy he has been charged with want of principle—­yet