E.B.B. to R.B.

[Post-mark, February 24, 1846.]

Ever dearest, it is only when you go away, when you are quite gone, out of the house and the street, that I get up and think properly, and with the right gratitude of your flowers.  Such beautiful flowers you brought me this time too! looking like summer itself, and smelling!  Doing the ‘honour due’ to the flowers, makes your presence a little longer with me, the sun shines back over the hill just by that time, and then drops, till the next letter.

If I had had the letter on Saturday as ought to have been, no, I could not have answered it so that you should have my answer on Sunday—­no, I should still have had to write first.

Now you understand that I do not object to the writing first, but only to the hearing second.  I would rather write than not—­I!  But to be written to is the chief gladness of course; and with all you say of liking to have my letters (which I like to hear quite enough indeed) you cannot pretend to think that yours are not more to me, most to me!  Ask my guardian-angel and hear what he says!  Yours will look another way for shame of measuring joys with him!  Because as I have said before, and as he says now, you are all to me, all the light, all the life; I am living for you now.  And before I knew you, what was I and where?  What was the world to me, do you think? and the meaning of life?  And now, when you come and go, and write and do not write, all the hours are chequered accordingly in so many squares of white and black, as if for playing at fox and goose ... only there is no fox, and I will not agree to be goose for one ... that is you perhaps, for being ‘too easily’ satisfied.

So my claim is that you are more to me than I can be to you at any rate.  Mr. Fox said on Sunday that I was a ‘religious hermit’ who wrote ‘poems which ought to be read in a Gothic alcove’; and religious hermits, when they care to see visions, do it better, they all say, through fasting and flagellation and seclusion in dark places.  St. Theresa, for instance, saw a clearer glory by such means, than your Sir Moses Montefiore through his hundred-guinea telescope.  Think then, how every shadow of my life has helped to throw out into brighter, fuller significance, the light which comes to me from you ... think how it is the one light, seen without distractions.

I was thinking the other day that certainly and after all (or rather before all) I had loved you all my life unawares, that is, the idea of you.  Women begin for the most part, (if ever so very little given to reverie) by meaning, in an aside to themselves, to love such and such an ideal, seen sometimes in a dream and sometimes in a book, and forswearing their ancient faith as the years creep on.  I say a book, because I remember a friend of mine who looked everywhere for the original of Mr. Ward’s ‘Tremaine,’ because nothing would do for her, she insisted,