Your own

BA.

If it were not for Mr. Kenyon, I should say, almost, Wednesday, instead of Thursday—­I want to see you so much, and to see for myself about the looks and spirits, only it would not do if he found you here on Wednesday.  Let him come to-morrow or on Tuesday, and Wednesday will be safe—­shall we consider? what do you think?

R.B. to E.B.B.

Sunday Afternoon.
[Post-mark, February 16, 1846.]

Here is the letter again, dearest:  I suppose it gives me the same pleasure, in reading, as you—­and Mr. K. as me, and anybody else as him; if all the correspondence which was claimed again and burnt on some principle or other some years ago be at all of the nature of this sample, the measure seems questionable.  Burn anybody’s real letters, well and good:  they move and live—­the thoughts, feelings, and expressions even,—­in a self-imposed circle limiting the experience of two persons only—­there is the standard, and to that the appeal—­how should a third person know?  His presence breaks the line, so to speak, and lets in a whole tract of country on the originally inclosed spot—­so that its trees, which were from side to side there, seem left alone and wondering at their sudden unimportance in the broad land; while its ‘ferns such as I never saw before’ and which have been petted proportionably, look extravagant enough amid the new spread of good honest grey grass that is now the earth’s general wear.  So that the significance is lost at once, and whole value of such letters—­the cypher changed, the vowel-points removed:  but how can that affect clever writing like this?  What do you, to whom it is addressed, see in it more than the world that wants to see it and shan’t have it?  One understands shutting an unprivileged eye to the ineffable mysteries of those ‘upper-rooms,’ now that the broom and dust pan, stocking-mending and gingerbread-making are invested with such unforeseen reverence ... but the carriage-sweep and quarry, together with Jane and our baskets, and a pleasant shadow of Wordsworth’s Sunday hat preceding his own rapid strides in the direction of Miss Fenwick’s house—­surely, ’men’s eyes were made to see, so let them gaze’ at all this!  And so I, gazing with a clear conscience, am very glad to hear so much good of a very good person and so well told.  She plainly sees the proper use and advantage of a country-life; and that knowledge gets to seem a high point of attainment doubtless by the side of the Wordsworth she speaks of—­for mine he shall not be as long as I am able!  Was ever such a ‘great’ poet before?  Put one trait with the other—­the theory of rural innocence—­alternation of ‘vulgar trifles’ with dissertating with style of ‘the utmost grandeur that even you can conceive’ (speak for yourself, Miss M.!)—­and that amiable transition from two o’clock’s grief at the death of one’s brother to three o’clock’s happiness in the ‘extraordinary