y:
For in pure love did Heav'n prepare
Those powders to enrich your hair.

3.

Ask me no more whither doth haste
The nightingale when June is past:
For in your sweet dividing throat
She winters, and keeps warm her note.

4.

Ask me no more where those stars light
That downward fall at dead of night:
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixed become, as in their sphere.

5.

Ask me no more if east or west
The phoenix builds her spicy nest:
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies.

These lines are exaggerated, as all in Charles's time, but very
beautiful. . . .

Yours most affectionately, E.

LONDON, _Nov_. [27, 1832.]

MY DEAR ALLEN,

The first thing I do in answering your letter is to tell you that I am
angry at your saying that your conscience pricks you for not having
written to me before. I am of that superior race of men, that are quite
content to hear themselves talk, and read their own writing. But, in
seriousness, I have such love of you, and of myself, that once every
week, at least, I feel spurred on by a sort of gathering up of feelings
to vent myself in a letter upon you: but if once I hear you say that it
makes your conscience thus uneasy till you answer, I shall give it up.
Upon my word I tell you, that I do not in the least require it. You, who
do not love writing, cannot think that any one else does: but I am sorry
to say that I have a very young-lady-like partiality to writing to those
that I love. . . . I have been reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: and I
believe I am unprejudiced when I say, I had but half an idea of him,
Demigod as he seemed before, till I read them carefully. How can Hazlitt
call Warton's the finest sonnets? There is the air of pedantry and
labour in his. But Shakespeare's are perfectly simple, and have the very
essence of tenderness that is only to be found in the best parts of his
Romeo and Juliet besides. I have truly been lapped in these Sonnets for
some time: they seem all stuck about my heart, like the ballads that used
to be on the walls of London. I have put a great many into my Paradise,
giving each a fair white sheet for himself: there being nothing worthy to
be in the same page. I could talk for an hour about them: but it is not
fit in a letter. . . .

I shall tell you of myself, that I have been better since I wrote to you.
Mazzinghi {14} tells me that November weather b