e to me under my actual circumstances.

The 'Palm Leaves'[94] are full of strong thought and good
thought--thought expressed excellently well; but of poetry, in
the true sense, and of imagination in any, I think them bare and
cold--somewhat wintry leaves to come from the East, surely, surely!

May the change of air be rapid in doing you good--the weather seems to
be softening on purpose for you. May God bless you, dear Mr. Kenyon;
I never can thank you enough. When you return I shall be rustling my
'proofs' about you, to prove my faith in your kindness.

Ever affectionately yours,
E.B.B.

[Footnote 93: In the 'Drama of Exile,' near the beginning (_Poetical
Works_, i. 7).]

[Footnote 94: By Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton.]

_To H.S. Boyd_
March 22, 1844.

My dearest Mr. Boyd,--I heard that once I wrote three times too long
a letter to you; I am aware that nine times too long a silence is
scarcely the way to make up for it. Forgive me, however, as far as you
can, for every sort of fault. When I once begin to write to you, I do
not know how to stop; and I have had so much to do lately as scarcely
to know how to begin to write to you. _Hence these_ faults--not quite
tears--in spite of my penitence and the quotation.

At last my book is in the press. My great poem (in the modest
comparative sense), my 'Masque of Exile' (as I call it at last[95]),
consists of some nineteen hundred or two thousand lines, and I call it
'Masque of _Exile_' because it refers to Lucifer's exile, and to that
other mystical exile of the Divine Being which was the means of the
return homewards of my Adam and Eve. After the exultation of boldness
of composition, I fell into one of my deepest fits of despondency, and
at last, at the end of most painful vacillations, determined not to
print it. Never was a manuscript so near the fire as my 'Masque' was.
I had not even the instinct of applying for help to anybody. In the
midst of this Mr. Kenyon came in by accident, and asked about my poem.
I told him that I had given it up, despairing of my republic. In the
kindest way he took it into his hands, and proposed to carry it home
and read it, and tell me his impression. 'You know,' he said, 'I have
a prejudice against these sacred subjects for poetry, but then I have
another prejudice _for you_, and one may neutralise the other.' The
next day I had a letter from him with the returned manuscript--a
letter which I was absolutely certain