What a way I am from your letter—­that letter—­or seem to be rather—­for one may think of one thing and yet go on writing distrustedly of other things.  So you are ‘grateful’ to my sisters ... you!  Now I beseech you not to talk such extravagances; I mean such extravagances as words like these imply—­and there are far worse words than these, in the letter ... such as I need not put my finger on; words which are sense on my lips, but no sense at all on yours, and which make me disquietedly sure that you are under an illusion.  Observe!—­certainly I should not choose to have a ‘claim,’ see!  Only, what I object to, in ‘illusions,’ ‘miracles,’ and things of that sort, is the want of continuity common to such.  When Joshua caused the sun to stand still, it was not for a year even!—­Ungrateful, I am!

And ‘pretty well’ means ‘not well’ I am afraid—­or I should be gladder still of the new act.  You will tell me on Tuesday what ‘pretty well’ means, and if your mother is better—­or I may have a letter to-morrow—­dearest!  May God bless you!

To-morrow too, at half past three o’clock, how joyful I shall be that my ‘kind considerateness’ decided not to receive you until Tuesday.  My very kind considerateness, which made me eat my dinner to-day!

Your own

BA.

A hundred letters I have, by this last, ... to set against Napoleon’s Hundred Days—­did you know that?

So much better I am to-night:  it was nothing but a little chill from the damp—­the fog, you see!

R.B. to E.B.B.

                              Monday Morning.
                              [Post-mark, January 19, 1846.]

Love, if you knew but how vexed I was, so very few minutes after my note left last night; how angry with the unnecessary harshness into which some of the phrases might be construed—­you would forgive me, indeed.  But, when all is confessed and forgiven, the fact remains—­that it would be the one trial I know I should not be able to bear; the repetition of these ’scenes’—­intolerable—­not to be written of, even my mind refuses to form a clear conception of them.

My own loved letter is come—­and the news; of which the reassuring postscript lets the interrupted joy flow on again.  Well, and I am not to be grateful for that; nor that you do ‘eat your dinner’?  Indeed you will be ingenious to prevent me!  I fancy myself meeting you on ’the stairs’—­stairs and passages generally, and galleries (ah, thou indeed!) all, with their picturesque accidents, of landing-places, and spiral heights and depths, and sudden turns and visions of half open doors into what Quarles calls ’mollitious chambers’—­and above all, landing-places—­they are my heart’s delight—­I would come upon you unaware in a landing-place in my next dream!  One day we may walk on the galleries round and over the inner court of the Doges’ Palace at Venice; and read, on tablets against the wall, how such an one was banished for an ’enormous dig (intacco) into the public treasure’—­another for ... what you are not to know because his friends have got chisels and chipped away the record of it—­underneath the ‘giants’ on their stands, and in the midst of the cortile the bronze fountains whence the girls draw water.