Your R.B.

Oh, let me tell you in the bitterness of my heart, that it was only 4 o’clock—­that clock I enquired about—­and that, ... no, I shall never say with any grace what I want to say ... and now dare not ... that you all but owe me an extra quarter of an hour next time:  as in the East you give a beggar something for a few days running—­then you miss him; and next day he looks indignant when the regular dole falls and murmurs—­’And, for yesterday?’—­Do I stay too long, I want to know,—­too long for the voice and head and all but the spirit that may not so soon tire,—­knowing the good it does.  If you would but tell me.

God bless you—­

E.B.B. to R.B.

Saturday.
[Post-mark, July 28, 1845]

You say too much indeed in this letter which has crossed mine—­and particularly as there is not a word in it of what I most wanted to know and want to know ... how you are—­for you must observe, if you please, that the very paper you pour such kindness on, was written after your own example and pattern, when, in the matter of my ‘Prometheus’ (such different wearying matter!), you took trouble for me and did me good.  Judge from this, if even in inferior things, there can be gratitude from you to me!—­or rather, do not judge—­but listen when I say that I am delighted to have met your wishes in writing as I wrote; only that you are surely wrong in refusing to see a single wrongness in all that heap of weedy thoughts, and that when you look again, you must come to the admission of it.  One of the thistles is the suggestion about the line

    Was it singing, was it saying,

which you wrote so, and which I proposed to amend by an intermediate ‘or.’  Thinking of it at a distance, it grows clear to me that you were right, and that there should be and must be no ‘or’ to disturb the listening pause.  Now should there?  And there was something else, which I forget at this moment—­and something more than the something else.  Your account of the production of the poem interests me very much—­and proves just what I wanted to make out from your statements the other day, and they refused, I thought, to let me, ... that you are more faithful to your first Idea than to your first plan.  Is it so? or not?  ‘Orange’ is orange—­but which half of the orange is not predestinated from all eternity—­:  is it so?

Sunday.—­I wrote so much yesterday and then went out, not knowing very well how to speak or how to be silent (is it better to-day?) of some expressions of yours ... and of your interest in me—­which are deeply affecting to my feelings—­whatever else remains to be said of them.  And you know that you make great mistakes, ... of fennel for hemlock, of four o’clocks for five o’clocks, and of other things of more consequence, one for another; and may not be quite right besides as to my getting well ‘if I please!’ ... which reminds