nt at the notion--we turned to the index, in
large text-hand, and stopped at 'Miss B.'--and _he_ indeed read them,
or some of them, but holding the volume at a distance which defied my
short-sighted eye--all _I_ saw was the _faint_ small characters--and,
do you know ... I neither trusted myself to ask a nearer look ... nor
a second look ... as if I were studying unduly what I had just said
was most unfairly exposed to view!--so I was silent, and lost you (in
that)--then, and for ever, I promise you, now that you speak of
vexation it would give you. _All_ I know of the notes, that _one_ is
addressed to Talfourd in the third person--and when I had run through
my own ... not far off ... (BA-BR)--I was sick of the book altogether.
You are generous to me--but, to say the truth, I might have remembered
the most justifying circumstance in my case ... which was, that my own
'Paracelsus,' printed a few months before, had been as dead a failure
as 'Ion' a brilliant success--for, until just before.... Ah, really I
forget!--but I know that until Forster's notice in the _Examiner_
appeared, _every_ journal that thought worth while to allude to the
poem at all, treated it with entire contempt ... beginning, I think,
with the _Athenaeum_ which _then_ made haste to say, a few days after
its publication, 'that it was not without talent but spoiled by
obscurity and only an imitation of--Shelley'!--something to this
effect, in a criticism of about three lines among their 'Library
Table' notices. And that first taste was a most flattering sample of
what the 'craft' had in store for me--since my publisher and I had
fairly to laugh at _his_ 'Book'--(quite of another kind than the
Serjeant's)--in which he was used to paste extracts from newspapers
and the like--seeing that, out of a long string of notices, one vied
with its predecessor in disgust at my 'rubbish,' as their word went:
but Forster's notice altered a good deal--which I have to recollect
for his good. Still, the contrast between myself and Talfourd was so
_utter_--you remember the world's-wonder 'Ion' made,--that I was
determined not to pass for the curious piece of neglected merit I
really _was not_--and so!--

But, dearest, why should you leave your own especial sphere of doing
me good for another than yours?

Does the sun rake and hoe about the garden as well as thine steadily
over it? _Why_ must you, who give me heart and power, as nothing else
did or could, to do well--conc