_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 me a little
of what Papa says sometimes when he comes into this room unexpectedly
and convicts me of having dry toast for dinner, and declares angrily
that obstinacy and dry toast have brought me to my present condition,
and that if I _pleased_ to have porter and beefsteaks instead, I
should be as well as ever I was, in a month!... But where is the need
of talking of it? What I wished to say was this--that if I get better
or worse ... as long as I live and to the last moment of life, I shall
remember with an emotion which cannot change its character, all the
generous interest and feeling you have spent on me--_wasted_ on me I
was going to write--but I would not provoke any answering--and in one
obvious sense, it need not be so. I never shall forget these things,
my dearest friend; nor remember them more coldly. God's goodness!--I
believe in it, as in His sunshine here--which makes my head ache a
little, while it comes in at the window, and makes most other people
gayer--it does _me_ good too in a different way. And so, may God bless
you! and me in this ... just this, ... that I may never have the
sense, ... intolerable in the remotest apprehension of it ... of
being, in any way, directly or indirectly, the means of ruffling your
smooth path by so much as one of my flint-stones!--In the meantime you
do not tire me indeed even when you go later for sooner ... and I do
not tire myself even when I write longer and duller letters to you (if
the last is possible) than the one I am ending now ... as the most
grateful (leave me that word) of your friends.