On the other side, and to make the good omen complete, I remembered, after I had sealed my last letter, having made a confusion between the ivory and horn gates, the gates of false and true visions, as I am apt to do—­and my penholder belongs to the ivory gate, ... as you will perceive in your lucid moments—­poor holder!  But, as you forget me on Wednesdays, the post testifying, ... the sinecure may not be quite so certain as the Thursday’s letter says.  And I too, in the meanwhile, grow wiser, ... having learnt something which you cannot do,—­you of the ‘Bells and Pomegranates’:  You cannot make a pen. Yesterday I looked round the world in vain for it.

Mr. Kenyon does not come—­will not perhaps until Saturday!  Which reminds me—­Mr. Kenyon told me about a year ago that he had been painfully employed that morning in parting two—­dearer than friends—­and he had done it he said, by proving to either, that he or she was likely to mar the prospects of the other.  ’If I had spoken to each, of himself or herself,’ he said, ‘I never could have done it.’

Was not that an ingenious cruelty?  The remembrance rose up in me like a ghost, and made me ask you once to promise what you promised ... (you recollect?) because I could not bear to be stabbed with my own dagger by the hand of a third person ... so!  When people have lucid moments themselves, you know, it is different.

And shall I indeed have a letter to-morrow?  Or, not having the penholder yet, will you....

Goodnight.  May God bless you—­

Ever and wholly your

BA.

R.B. to E.B.B.

[Post-mark, January 23, 1846.]

Now, of all perverse interpretations that ever were and never ought to have been, commend me to this of Ba’s—­after I bade her generosity ‘understand me,’ too!—­which meant, ’let her pick out of my disjointed sentences a general meaning, if she can,—­which I very well know their imperfect utterance would not give to one unsupplied with the key of my whole heart’s-mystery’—­and Ba, with the key in her hand, to pretend and poke feathers and penholders into the key-hole, and complain that the wards are wrong!  So—­when the poor scholar, one has read of, uses not very dissimilar language and argument—­who being threatened with the deprivation of his Virgil learnt the AEneid by heart and then said ’Take what you can now’!—­that Ba calls ’feeling the loss would not be so hard after all’!—­I do not, at least.  And if at any future moment I should again be visited—­as I earnestly desire may never be the case—­with a sudden consciousness of the entire inutility of all earthly love (since of my love) to hold its object back from the decree of God, if such should call it away; one of those known facts which, for practical good, we treat as supremely common-place, but which, like those of the uncertainty of life—­the