the kisses and the thankfulness—­written with no penholder that is to belong to me, I hope—­but with the feather, possibly, which Sycorax wiped the dew from, as Caliban remembered when he was angry!  All but—­(that is, all was wrong but)—­to be just ... the old, dear, so dear ending which makes my heart beat now as at first ... and so, pays for all!  Wherefore, all is right again, is it not? and you are my own priceless Ba, my very own—­and I will have you, if you like that style, and want you, and must have you every day and all day long—­much less see you to-morrow stand—­

...  Now, there breaks down my new spirit—­and, shame or no, I must pray you, in the old way, not to receive me standing—­I should not remain master of myself I do believe!

You have put out of my head all I intended to write—­and now I slowly begin to remember the matters they seem strangely unimportant—­that poor impotency of a Newspaper!  No—­nothing of that for the present.  To-morrow my dearest!  Ba’s first comment—­’To-morrow? To-day is too soon, it seems—­yet it is wise, perhaps, to avoid the satiety &c. &c. &c. &c. &c.’

Does she feel how I kissed that comment back on her dear self as fit punishment?

E.B.B. to R.B.

[Post-mark, January 26, 1846.]

I must begin by invoking my own stupidity!  To forget after all the penholder!  I had put it close beside me too on the table, and never once thought of it afterwards from first to last—­just as I should do if I had a common-place book, the memoranda all turning to obliviscenda as by particular contact.  So I shall send the holder with Miss Martineau’s books which you can read or not as you like ... they have beauty in passages ... but, trained up against the wall of a set design, want room for branching and blossoming, great as her skill is.  I like her ‘Playfellow’ stories twice as well.  Do you know them?  Written for children, and in such a fine heroic child-spirit as to be too young and too old for nobody.  Oh, and I send you besides a most frightful extract from an American magazine sent to me yesterday ... no, the day before ... on the subject of mesmerism—­and you are to understand, if you please, that the Mr. Edgar Poe who stands committed in it, is my dedicator ... whose dedication I forgot, by the way, with the rest—­so, while I am sending, you shall have his poems with his mesmeric experience and decide whether the outrageous compliment to E.B.B. or the experiment on M. Vandeleur [Valdemar] goes furthest to prove him mad.  There is poetry in the man, though, now and then, seen between the great gaps of bathos....  ‘Politian’ will make you laugh—­as the ‘Raven’ made me laugh, though with something in it which accounts for the hold it took upon people such as Mr. N.P.  Willis and his peers—­it was sent to me from four different quarters besides the author himself, before its publication