in you, and happiness with you, runs over and froths if it don’t sparkle—­underneath is a deep, a sea not to be moved.  But chance, chance! there is no chance here!  I have gained enough for my life, I can only put in peril the gaining more than enough.  You shall change altogether my dear, dearest love, and I will be happy to the last minute on what I can remember of this past year—­I could do that. Now, jump with me out, Ba!  If you feared for yourself—­all would be different, sadly different—­But saying what you do say, promising ’the strength of arm’—­do not wonder that I call it an assurance of all being ‘well’!  All is best, as you promise—­dear, darling Ba!—­and I say, in my degree, with all the energy of my nature, as you say, promise as you promise—­only meaning a worship of you that is solely fit for me, fit by position—­are not you my ‘mistress?’ Come, some good out of those old conventions, in which you lost faith after the Bower’s disappearance, (it was carried by the singing angels, like the house at Loretto, to the Siren’s isle where we shall find it preserved in a beauty ’very rare and absolute’)—­is it not right you should be my Lady, my Queen? and you are, and ever must be, dear Ba.  Because I am suffered to kiss the lips, shall I ever refuse to embrace the feet? and kiss lips, and embrace feet, love you wholly, my Ba!  May God bless you—­

Ever your own,

R.

It would be easy for Mr. Buckingham to find a Merchant-ship bound for some Mediterranean port, after a week or two in harbour, to another and perhaps a third—­Naples, Palermo, Syra, Constantinople, and so on.  The expense would be very trifling, but the want of comfort enormous for an invalid—­the one advantage is the solitariness of the one passenger among all those rough new creatures. I like it much, and soon get deep into their friendship, but another has other ways of viewing matters.  No one article provided by the ship in the way of provisions can anybody touch.  Mr. B. must lay in his own stock, and the horrors of dirt and men’s ministry are portentous, yet by a little arrangement beforehand much might be done.  Still, I only know my own powers of endurance, and counsel nobody to gain my experience.  On the other hand, were all to do again, I had rather have seen Venice so, with the five or six weeks’ absolute rest of the mind’s eyes, than any other imaginable way,—­except Balloon-travelling.

Do you think they meant Landor’s ’Count Julian’—­the ’subject of his tragedy’ sure enough,—­and that he was the friend of Southey?  So it struck me—­

E.B.B. to R.B.

                                Tuesday Evening.
                                [Post-mark, March 18, 1846.]