_R.B. to E.B.B._
Friday Morning.
[Post-mark, December 19, 1845.]
I ought to have written yesterday: so to-day when I need a letter and
get none, there is my own fault besides, and the less consolation. A
letter from you would light up this sad day. Shall I fancy how, if a
letter lay _there_ where I look, rain might fall and winds blow while
I listened to you, long after the _words_ had been laid to heart? But
here you are in your place--with me who am your own--your own--and so
the rhyme joins on,
She shall speak to me in places lone
With a low and holy tone--
Ay: when I have lit my lamp at night
She shall be present with my sprite:
And I will say, whate'er it be,
Every word she telleth me!
Now, is that taken from your book? No--but from _my_ book, which holds
my verses as I write them; and as I open it, I read that.
And speaking of verse--somebody gave me a few days ago that Mr.
Lowell's book you once mentioned to me. Anyone who 'admires' _you_
shall have my sympathy at once--even though he _do_ change the
laughing wine-_mark_ into a 'stain' in that perfectly beautiful
triplet--nor am I to be indifferent to his good word for myself
(though not very happily connected with the criticism on the epithet
in that 'Yorkshire Tragedy'--which has better things, by the
way--seeing that 'white boy,' in old language, meant just 'good boy,'
a general epithet, as Johnson notices in the life of Dryden, whom the
schoolmaster Busby was used to class with his 'white boys'--this is
hypercriticism, however). But these American books should not be
reprinted here--one asks, what and where is the class to which they
address themselves? for, no doubt, we have our congregations of
ignoramuses that enjoy the profoundest ignorance imaginable on the
subjects treated of; but _these_ are evidently not the audience Mr.
Lowell reckons on; rather, if one may trust the manner of his setting
to work, he would propound his doctrine to the class. Always to be
found, of spirits instructed up to a certain height and there
resting--vines that run up a prop and there tangle and grow to a
knot--which want supplying with fresh poles; so the provident man
brings his bundle into the grounds, and sticks them in laterally or
a-top of the others, as the case requires, and all the old stocks go
on growing again--but here, with us, whoever _wanted_ Chaucer, or
Chapman, or Ford, got him long ago--what else have Lamb, and
Coleridge, and Hazlitt and Hunt and so on to the end of their
generations ... what else been doing this many a year? What one
passage of all these, cited with the very air of a Columbus, but has
been known to all who know anything of poetry this many, many a year?
The others, who don't know anything, are the stocks that have got to
_shoot_, not climb higher--_compost_, they want in the first place!
Ford's and Crashaw's rival Nightingales--why they have been
dissertated on by Wordsworth and Coleridge, then by Lamb and Hazlitt,
then worked to death by Hunt, who printed them entire and quoted them
to pieces again, in every periodical he was ever engaged upon; and yet
after all, here 'Philip'--'must read' (out of a roll of dropping
papers with yellow ink tracings, so old!) something at which 'John'
claps his hands and says 'Really--that these ancients should own so
much wit &c.'! The _passage_ no longer looks its fresh self after this
veritable passage from hand to hand: as when, in old dances, the belle
began the figure with her own partner, and by him was transferred to
the next, and so to the next--_they_ ever _beginning_ with all the old
alacrity and spirit; but she bearing a still-accumulating weight of
tokens of gallantry, and none the better for every fresh pushing and
shoving and pulling and hauling--till, at the bottom of the room--
To which Mr. Lowell might say, that--No, I will say the true thing
against myself--and it is, that when I turn from what is in my mind,
and determine to write about anybody's book to avoid writing that I
love and love and love again my own, dearest love--because of the
cuckoo-song of it,--_then_, I shall be in no better humour with that
book than with Mr. Lowell's!
But I _have_ a new thing to say or sing--you never before heard me
love and bless and send my heart after--'Ba'--did you? Ba ... and
that is you! I TRIED ... (more than _wanted_) to call you _that_, on
Wednesday! I have a flower here--rather, a tree, a mimosa, which must
be turned and turned, the side to the light changing in a little time
to the _leafy_ side, where all the fans lean and spread ... so I turn
your name to me, that side I have not last seen: you cannot tell how I
feel glad that you will not part with the name--Barrett--seeing you
have two of the same--and must always, moreover, remain my EBB!
Dearest 'E.B.C.'--no, no! and so it will never be!
Have you seen Mr. Kenyon? I did not write ... knowing that such a
procedure would draw the kind sure letter in return, with the
invitation &c., as if I had asked for it! I had perhaps better call on
him some morning very early.
Bless you, my own sweetest. You will write to me, I know in my heart!
Ever may God bless you!