And _is it_ nothing to be 'justified to one's self in one's
resources?' '_That's all_,' indeed! For the 'soul's country' we will
have it also--and I know how well the birds sing in it. How glad I was
by the way to see your letter!
_R.B. to E.B.B._
Wednesday Morning.
[Post-mark, April 30, 1845.]
If you did but know, dear Miss Barrett, how the 'full stop' after
'Morning' just above, has turned out the fullest of stops,--and how
for about a quarter of an hour since the ink dried I have been
reasoning out the why and wherefore of the stopping, the wisdom of it,
and the folly of it....
By this time you see what you have got in me--You ask me questions,
'if I like novels,' 'if the "Improvisatore" is not good,' 'if travel
and sightseeing do not effect this and that for one,' and 'what I am
devising--play or poem,'--and I shall not say I could not answer at
all manner of lengths--but, let me only begin some good piece of
writing of the kind, and ... no, you shall have it, have what I was
going to tell you stops such judicious beginnings,--in a parallel
case, out of which your ingenuity shall, please, pick the
meaning--There is a story of D'Israeli's, an old one, with an episode
of strange interest, or so I found it years ago,--well, you go
breathlessly on with the people of it, page after page, till at last
the end _must_ come, you feel--and the tangled threads draw to one,
and an out-of-door feast in the woods helps you ... that is, helps
them, the people, wonderfully on,--and, lo, dinner is done, and Vivian
Grey is here, and Violet Fane there,--and a detachment of the party is
drafted off to go catch butterflies, and only two or three stop
behind. At this moment, Mr. Somebody, a good man and rather the lady's
uncle, 'in answer to a question from Violet, drew from his pocket a
small neatly written manuscript, and, seating himself on an inverted
wine-cooler, proceeded to read the following brief remarks upon the
characteristics of the Moeso-gothic literature'--this ends the
page,--which you don't turn at once! But when you _do_, in bitterness
of soul, turn it, you read--'On consideration, I' (Ben, himself)
'shall keep them for Mr. Colburn's _New Magazine_'--and deeply you
draw thankful breath! (Note this 'parallel case' of mine is pretty
sure to meet the usual fortune of my writings--you will ask what it
means--and this it means, or should mean, all of it, instance and
reasoning and all,--that I am naturally earnest, in earnest about
whatever thing I do, and little able to write about one thing while I
think of another)--
I think I will really write verse to you some day--_this_ day, it is
quite clear I had better give up trying.
No, spite of all the lines in the world, I will make an end of it, as
Ophelia with her swan's-song,--for it grows too absurd. But remember
that I write letters to nobody but you, and that I want method and
much more. That book you like so, the Danish novel, must be full of
truth and beauty, to judge from the few extracts I have seen in
Reviews. That a Dane should write so, confirms me in an old
belief--that Italy is stuff for the use of the North, and no
more--pure Poetry there is none, nearly as possible none, in Dante
even--material for Poetry in the pitifullest romancist of their
thousands, on the contrary--strange that those great wide black eyes
should stare nothing out of the earth that lies before them! Alfieri,
with even grey eyes, and a life of travel, writes you some fifteen
tragedies as colourless as salad grown under a garden glass with
matting over it--as free, that is, from local colouring, touches of
the soil they are said to spring from,--think of 'Saulle,' and his
Greek attempts!
I expected to see Mr. Kenyon, at a place where I was last week, but he
kept away. Here is the bad wind back again, and the black sky. I am
sure I never knew till now whether the East or West or South were the
quarter to pray for--But surely the weather was a little better last
week, and you, were you not better? And do you know--but it's all
self-flattery I believe,--still I cannot help fancying the East wind
does my head harm too!
Ever yours faithfully,