R.B. to E.B.B.

Sunday Evening.
[Post-mark, August 4, 1845.]

I said what you comment on, about Mr. Kenyon, because I feel I must always tell you the simple truth—­and not being quite at liberty to communicate the whole story (though it would at once clear me from the charge of over-curiosity ... if I much cared for that!)—­I made my first request in order to prevent your getting at any part of it from him which should make my withholding seem disingenuous for the moment—­that is, till my explanation came, if it had an opportunity of coming.  And then, when I fancied you were misunderstanding the reason of that request—­and supposing I was ambitious of making a higher figure in his eyes than your own,—­I then felt it ‘on my mind’ and so spoke ... a natural mode of relief surely!  For, dear friend, I have once been untrue to you—­when, and how, and why, you know—­but I thought it pedantry and worse to hold by my words and increase their fault.  You have forgiven me that one mistake, and I only refer to it now because if you should ever make that a precedent, and put any least, most trivial word of mine under the same category, you would wrong me as you never wronged human being:—­and that is done with.  For the other matter,—­the talk of my visits, it is impossible that any hint of them can ooze out of the only three persons in the world to whom I ever speak of them—­my father, mother and sister—­to whom my appreciation of your works is no novelty since some years, and whom I made comprehend exactly your position and the necessity for the absolute silence I enjoined respecting the permission to see you.  You may depend on them,—­and Miss Mitford is in your keeping, mind,—­and dear Mr. Kenyon, if there should be never so gentle a touch of ‘garrulous God-innocence’ about those kind lips of his.  Come, let me snatch at that clue out of the maze, and say how perfect, absolutely perfect, are those three or four pages in the ‘Vision’ which present the Poets—­a line, a few words, and the man there,—­one twang of the bow and the arrowhead in the white—­Shelley’s ’white ideal all statue-blind’ is—­perfect,—­how can I coin words?  And dear deaf old Hesiod—­and—­all, all are perfect, perfect!  But ’the Moon’s regality will hear no praise’—­well then, will she hear blame?  Can it be you, my own you past putting away, you are a schismatic and frequenter of Independent Dissenting Chapels?  And you confess this to me—­whose father and mother went this morning to the very Independent Chapel where they took me, all those years back, to be baptised—­and where they heard, this morning, a sermon preached by the very minister who officiated on that other occasion!  Now will you be particularly encouraged by this successful instance to bring forward any other point of disunion between us that may occur to you?  Please do not—­for so sure as you begin proving that there is a gulf fixed