what is most expedient to do, and my ’flesh shall come again like a little child’s,’ and one day, oh the day, I shall see you with my own, own eyes ... for, how little you understand me; or rather, yourself,—­if you think I would dare see you, without your leave, that way!  Do you suppose that your power of giving and refusing ends when you have shut your room-door?  Did I not tell you I turned down another street, even, the other day, and why not down yours?  And often as I see Mr. Kenyon, have I ever dreamed of asking any but the merest conventional questions about you; your health, and no more?

I will answer your letter, the last one, to-morrow—­I have said nothing of what I want to say.

Ever yours

R.B.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Tuesday Morning.
[Post-mark, May 13, 1845.]

Did I thank you with any effect in the lines I sent yesterday, dear Miss Barrett?  I know I felt most thankful, and, of course, began reasoning myself into the impropriety of allowing a ‘more’ or a ‘most’ in feelings of that sort towards you.  I am thankful for you, all about you—­as, do you not know?

Thank you, from my soul.

Now, let me never pass occasion of speaking well of Horne, who deserves your opinion of him,—­it is my own, too.—­He has unmistakable genius, and is a fine, honest, enthusiastic chivalrous fellow—­it is the fashion to affect to sneer at him, of late, I think—­the people he has praised fancying that they ‘pose’ themselves sculpturesquely in playing the Greatly Indifferent, and the other kind shaking each other’s hands in hysterical congratulations at having escaped such a dishonour:  I feel grateful to him, I know, for his generous criticism, and glad and proud of in any way approaching such a man’s standard of poetical height.  And he might be a disappointed man too,—­for the players trifled with and teased out his very nature, which has a strange aspiration for the horrible tin-and-lacquer ‘crown’ they give one from their clouds (of smooth shaven deal done over blue)—­and he don’t give up the bad business yet, but thinks a ‘small’ theatre would somehow not be a theatre, and an actor not quite an actor ...  I forget in what way, but the upshot is, he bates not a jot in that rouged, wigged, padded, empty-headed, heartless tribe of grimacers that came and canted me; not I, them;—­a thing he cannot understand—­so, I am not the one he would have picked out to praise, had he not been loyal.  I know he admires your poetry properly.  God help him, and send some great artist from the country, (who can read and write beside comprehending Shakspeare, and who ‘exasperates his H’s’ when the feat is to be done)—­to undertake the part of Cosmo, or Gregory, or what shall most soothe his spirit!  The subject of your play is tempting indeed—­and reminds one of that wild Drama of Calderon’s which frightened Shelley just before his death—­also, of Fuseli’s theory with reference to his own Picture of Macbeth in the witches’ cave ... wherein the apparition of the armed head from the cauldron is Macbeth’s own.