ut
into a great Hector of Troy, in relievo, with a high heroic box nose
and shoeties of columbine.[72] But that was long ago. Now I count the
buds of my primrose with a new kind of interest, and you never
saw such a primrose! I begin to believe in Ovid, and look for a
metamorphosis. The leaves are turning white and springing up as high
as corn. Want of air, and of sun, I suppose. I should be loth to think
it--want of friendship to _me_!

Do you know that the royal Boz lives close to us, three doors from Mr.
Kenyon in Harley Place? The new numbers appear to me admirable, and
full of life and blood--whatever we may say to the thick rouging and
extravagance of gesture. There is a beauty, a tenderness, too, in the
organ scene, which is worthy of the gilliflowers. But my admiration
for 'Boz' fell from its 'sticking place,' I confess, a good furlong,
when I read Victor Hugo; and my creed is, that, _not_ in his
tenderness, which is as much his own as his humour, but in his serious
powerful Jew-trial scenes, he has followed Hugo closely, and never
scarcely looked away from 'Les Trois Jours d'un Condamne.'

If you should not be on the road, I hope you won't be very long
before you are, and that dearest Mrs. Martin will put off building her
greenhouse--you see I believe she _will_ build it--until she gets home
again.

How kind of you and of her to have poor old Mrs. Barker at Colwall!

Do believe me, both of you, with love from all of _us_,

Very affectionately yours,
BA.

[Footnote 72: See 'Hector in the Garden' (_Poetical Works_, iii. 37).]

_To H.S. Boyd_
February 21, 1843.

Thank you, my very dear friend, I am as well as the east wind will
suffer me to be; and _that_, indeed, is not very well, my heart being
fuller of all manner of evil than is necessary to its humanity. But
the wind is changed, and the frost is gone, and it is not quite out of
my fancy yet that I may see you next summer. _You and summer are not
out of the question yet_. Therefore, you see, I cannot be very deep
in tribulation. But you may consider it a bad symptom that I have just
finished a poem of some five hundred lines in stanzas, called 'The
Lost Bower,'[73] and about nothing at all in particular.

As to Arabel, she is not an icicle. There are flowers which blow in
the frost--when we brambles are brown with their inward death--and she
is of them, dear thing. _You_ are not a bramble, though, and I hope
that when you talk of 'feeling the co