E.B.B. to R.B.

[Post-mark, February 12, 1846.]

Ah, the ‘sortes’!  Is it a double oracle—­’swan and shadow’—­do you think? or do my eyes see double, dazzled by the light of it?  ’I shall love thee to eternity’—­I shall.

And as for the wine, I did not indeed misunderstand you ’as my wont is,’ because I understood simply that ‘habitually’ you abstained from wine, and I meant exactly that perhaps it would be better for your health to take it habitually.  It might, you know—­not that I pretend to advise.  Only when you look so much too pale sometimes, it comes into one’s thoughts that you ought not to live on cresses and cold water.  Strong coffee, which is the nearest to a stimulant that I dare to take, as far as ordinary diet goes, will almost always deliver me from the worst of headaches, but there is no likeness, no comparison.  And your ‘quite well’ means that dreadful ‘turning’ still ... still!  Now do not think any more of the Domizias, nor ‘try to remember,’ which is the most wearing way of thinking.  The more I read and read your ‘Luria,’ the grander it looks, and it will make its own road with all understanding men, you need not doubt, and still less need you try to make me uneasy about the harm I have done in ‘coming between,’ and all the rest of it.  I wish never to do you greater harm than just that, and then with a white conscience ’I shall love thee to eternity!... dearest!  You have made a golden work out of your ’golden-hearted Luria’—­as once you called him to me, and I hold it in the highest admiration—­should, if you were precisely nothing to me.  And still, the fifth act rises!  That is certain.  Nevertheless I seem to agree with you that your hand has vacillated in your Domizia.  We do not know her with as full a light on her face, as the other persons—­we do not see the panther,—­no, certainly we do not—­but you will do a very little for her which will be everything, after a time ... and I assure you that if you were to ask for the manuscript before, you should not have a page of it—­now, you are only to rest.  What a work to rest upon!  Do consider what a triumph it is!  The more I read, the more I think of it, the greater it grows—­and as to ’faded lines,’ you never cut a pomegranate that was redder in the deep of it.  Also, no one can say ‘This is not clearly written.’  The people who are at ‘words of one syllable’ may be puzzled by you and Wordsworth together this time ... as far as the expression goes.  Subtle thoughts you always must have, in and out of ’Sordello’—­and the objectors would find even Plato (though his medium is as lucid as the water that ran beside the beautiful plane-tree!) a little difficult perhaps.