self sometimes, with
a strange fear.

I took up this paper to write a great deal--now, I don't think I shall
write much--'I shall see you,' I say!

That 'Luria' you enquire about, shall be my last play--for it is but a
play, woe's me! I have one done here, 'A Soul's Tragedy,' as it is
properly enough called, but _that_ would not do to end with (end I
will), and Luria is a Moor, of Othello's country, and devotes himself
to something he thinks Florence, and the old fortune follows--all in
my brain yet, but the bright weather helps and I will soon loosen my
Braccio and Puccio (a pale discontented man), and Tiburzio (the Pisan,
good true fellow, this one), and Domizia the Lady--loosen all these on
dear foolish (ravishing must his folly be), golden-hearted Luria, all
these with their worldly-wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways; and, for me,
the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with these as with
him,--so there can no good come of keeping this wild company any
longer, and 'Luria' and the other sadder ruin of one Chiappino--these
got rid of, I will do as you bid me, and--say first I have some
Romances and Lyrics, all dramatic, to dispatch, and _then_, I shall
stoop of a sudden under and out of this dancing ring of men and women
hand in hand, and stand still awhile, should my eyes dazzle, and when
that's over, they will be gone and you will be there, _pas vrai_? For,
as I think I told you, I always shiver involuntarily when I look--no,
glance--at this First Poem of mine to be. '_Now_,' I call it, what,
upon my soul,--for a solemn matter it is,--what is to be done _now_,
believed _now_, so far as it has been revealed to me--solemn words,
truly--and to find myself writing them to any one else! Enough now.

I know Tennyson 'face to face,'--no more than that. I know Carlyle and
love him--know him so well, that I would have told you he had shaken
that grand head of his at 'singing,' so thoroughly does he love and
live by it. When I last saw him, a fortnight ago, he turned, from I
don't know what other talk, quite abruptly on me with, 'Did you never
try to write a _Song_? Of all things in the world, _that_ I should be
proudest to do.' Then came his definition of a song--then, with an
appealing look to Mrs. C., 'I always say that some day in _spite of
nature and my stars_, I shall burst into a song' (he is not
mechanically 'musical,' he meant, and the music is the poetry, he
holds, and should enwrap the thought as Donne says 'an