R.B. to E.B.B.

Monday.
[Post-mark, February 16, 1846.]

My long letter is with you, dearest, to show how serious my illness was ‘while you wrote’:  unless you find that letter too foolish, as I do on twice thinking—­or at all events a most superfluous bestowment of handwork while the heart was elsewhere, and with you—­never more so!  Dear, dear Ba, your adorable goodness sinks into me till it nearly pains,—­so exquisite and strange is the pleasure:  so you care for me, and think of me, and write to me!—­I shall never die for you, and if it could be so, what would death prove?  But I can live on, your own as now,—­utterly your own.

Dear Ba, do you suppose we differ on so plain a point as that of the superior wisdom, and generosity, too, of announcing such a change &c. at the eleventh hour?  There can be no doubt of it,—­and now, what of it to me?

But I am not going to write to-day—­only this—­that I am better, having not been quite so well last night—­so I shut up books (that is, of my own) and mean to think about nothing but you, and you, and still you, for a whole week—­so all will come right, I hope! May I take Wednesday?  And do you say that,—­hint at the possibility of that, because you have been reached by my own remorse at feeling that if I had kept my appointment last Saturday (but one)—­Thursday would have been my day this past week, and this very Monday had been gained?  Shall I not lose a day for ever unless I get Wednesday and Saturday?—­yet ... care ... dearest—­let nothing horrible happen.

If I do not hear to the contrary to-morrow—­or on Wednesday early—­

But write and bless me dearest, most dear Ba.  God bless you ever—­

E.B.B. to R.B.

Monday Morning.
[Post-mark, February 17, 1846.]

Mechant comme quatre! you are, and not deserving to be let see the famous letter—­is there any grammar in that concatenation, can you tell me, now that you are in an arch-critical humour?  And remember (turning back to the subject) that personally she and I are strangers and that therefore what she writes for me is naturally scene-painting to be looked at from a distance, done with a masterly hand and most amiable intention, but quite a different thing of course from the intimate revelations of heart and mind which make a living thing of a letter.  If she had sent such to me, I should not have sent it to Mr. Kenyon, but then, she would not have sent it to me in any case.  What she has sent me might be a chapter in a book and has the life proper to itself, and I shall not let you try it by another standard, even if you wished, but you don’t—­for I am not so bete as not to understand how the jest crosses the serious all the way you write.  Well—­and Mr. Kenyon wants the letter the second time, not for himself, but for Mr. Crabb Robinson who promises to let me have a new sonnet of Wordsworth’s in