_R.B. to E.B.B._
Monday Morning.
[Post-mark, March 31, 1845.]
When you read Don Quixote, my dear romance-reader, do you ever notice
that flower of an incident of good fellowship where the friendly
Squire of Him of the Moon, or the Looking glasses, (I forget which)
passes to Sancho's dry lips, (all under a cork-tree one morning)--a
plump wine-skin,--and do you admire dear brave Miguel's knowledge of
thirsty nature when he tells you that the Drinker, having seriously
considered for a space the Pleiads, or place where they should be,
fell, as he slowly returned the shrivelled bottle to its donor, into a
deep musing of an hour's length, or thereabouts, and then ... mark ...
only _then_, fetching a profound sigh, broke silence with ... such a
piece of praise as turns pale the labours in that way of Rabelais and
the Teian (if he wasn't a Byzantine monk, alas!) and our Mr. Kenyon's
stately self--(since my own especial poet _à moi_, that can do all
with anybody, only 'sips like a fly,' she says, and so cares not to
compete with these behemoths that drink up Jordan)--Well, then ...
(oh, I must get quick to the sentence's end, and be brief as an
oracle-explainer!)--the giver is you and the taker is I, and the
letter is the wine, and the star-gazing is the reading the same, and
the brown study is--how shall I deserve and be grateful enough to this
new strange friend of my own, that has taken away my reproach among
men, that have each and all their friend, so they say (... not that I
believe all they say--they boast too soon sometimes, no doubt,--I once
was shown a letter wherein the truth stumbled out after this fashion
'Dere Smith,--I calls you "_dere_" ... because you are so in your
shop!')--and the great sigh is,--there is no deserving nor being
grateful at all,--and the breaking silence is, and the praise is ...
ah, there, enough of it! This sunny morning is as if I wished it for
you--10 strikes by the clock now--tell me if at 10 this morning you
feel any good from my heart's wishes for you--I would give you all you
want out of my own life and gladness and yet keep twice the stock that
should by right have sufficed the thin white face that is laughing at
me in the glass yonder at the fancy of its making anyone afraid ...
and now, with another kind of laugh, at the thought that when its
owner 'travels' next, he will leave off Miss Barrett along with port
wine--_Dii meliora piis_, and, among them to