shall have it, have what I was
going to tell you stops such judicious beginnings,--in a parallel
case, out of which your ingenuity shall, please, pick the
meaning--There is a story of D'Israeli's, an old one, with an episode
of strange interest, or so I found it years ago,--well, you go
breathlessly on with the people of it, page after page, till at last
the end _must_ come, you feel--and the tangled threads draw to one,
and an out-of-door feast in the woods helps you ... that is, helps
them, the people, wonderfully on,--and, lo, dinner is done, and Vivian
Grey is here, and Violet Fane there,--and a detachment of the party is
drafted off to go catch butterflies, and only two or three stop
behind. At this moment, Mr. Somebody, a good man and rather the lady's
uncle, 'in answer to a question from Violet, drew from his pocket a
small neatly written manuscript, and, seating himself on an inverted
wine-cooler, proceeded to read the following brief remarks upon the
characteristics of the Moeso-gothic literature'--this ends the
page,--which you don't turn at once! But when you _do_, in bitterness
of soul, turn it, you read--'On consideration, I' (Ben, himself)
'shall keep them for Mr. Colburn's _New Magazine_'--and deeply you
draw thankful breath! (Note this 'parallel case' of mine is pretty
sure to meet the usual fortune of my writings--you will ask what it
means--and this it means, or should mean, all of it, instance and
reasoning and all,--that I am naturally earnest, in earnest about
whatever thing I do, and little able to write about one thing while I
think of another)--

I think I will really write verse to you some day--_this_ day, it is
quite clear I had better give up trying.

No, spite of all the lines in the world, I will make an end of it, as
Ophelia with her swan's-song,--for it grows too absurd. But remember
that I write letters to nobody but you, and that I want method and
much more. That book you like so, the Danish novel, must be full of
truth and beauty, to judge from the few extracts I have seen in
Reviews. That a Dane should write so, confirms me in an old
belief--that Italy is stuff for the use of the North, and no
more--pure Poetry there is none, nearly as possible none, in Dante
even--material for Poetry in the pitifullest romancist of their
thousands, on the contrary--strange that those great wide black eyes
should stare nothing out of the earth that lies before them! Alfieri,
with even grey eyes, a