R.B.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Monday.
[Post-mark, July 21, 1845.]

But I never did strike you or touch you—­and you are not in earnest in the complaint you make—­and this is really all I am going to say to-day.  What I said before was wrung from me by words on your part, while you know far too well how to speak so as to make them go deepest, and which sometimes it becomes impossible, or over-hard to bear without deprecation:—­as when, for instance, you talk of being ‘grateful’ to me!!—­Well!  I will try that there shall be no more of it—­no more provocation of generosities—­and so, (this once) as you express it, I ‘will not have the heart to blame’ you—­except for reading my books against my will, which was very wrong indeed.  Mr. Kenyon asked me, I remember, (he had a mania of sending my copybook literature round the world to this person and that person, and I was roused at last into binding him by a vow to do so no more) I remember he asked me ...  ‘Is Mr. Browning to be excepted?’; to which I answered that nobody was to be excepted—­and thus he was quite right in resisting to the death ... or to dinner-time ... just as you were quite wrong after dinner.  Now, could a woman have been more curious?  Could the very author of the book have done worse?  But I leave my sins and yours gladly, to get into the Hood poems which have delighted me so—­and first to the St. Praxed’s which is of course the finest and most powerful ... and indeed full of the power of life ... and of death.  It has impressed me very much.  Then the ‘Angel and Child,’ with all its beauty and significance!—­and the ‘Garden Fancies’ ... some of the stanzas about the name of the flower, with such exquisite music in them, and grace of every kind—­and with that beautiful and musical use of the word ‘meandering,’ which I never remember having seen used in relation to sound before.  It does to mate with your ’simmering quiet’ in Sordello, which brings the summer air into the room as sure as you read it.  Then I like your burial of the pedant so much!—­you have quite the damp smell of funguses and the sense of creeping things through and through it.  And the ‘Laboratory’ is hideous as you meant to make it:—­only I object a little to your tendency ... which is almost a habit, and is very observable in this poem I think, ... of making lines difficult for the reader to read ... see the opening lines of this poem.  Not that music is required everywhere, nor in them certainly, but that the uncertainty of rhythm throws the reader’s mind off the rail ... and interrupts his progress with you and your influence with him.  Where we have not direct pleasure from rhythm, and where no peculiar impression is to be produced by the changes in it, we should be encouraged by the poet to forget it altogether; should we not?  I am quite wrong perhaps—­but you see how I do not conceal my wrongnesses where they mix themselves up