rite before. Are not these two
lawful letters? And do not they deserve an answer?

My life was ended when I knew you, and if I survive myself it is for
your sake:--_that_ resumes all my feelings and intentions in respect
to you. No 'counsel' could make the difference of a grain of dust in
the balance. It _is so_, and not otherwise. If you changed towards me,
it would be better for you I believe--and I should be only where I was
before. While you do _not_ change, I look to you for my first
affections and my first duty--and nothing but your bidding me, could
make me look away.

In the midst of this, Mr. Kenyon came and I felt as if I could not
talk to him. No--he does not 'see how it is.' He may have passing
thoughts sometimes, but they do not stay long enough to produce--even
an opinion. He asked if you had been here long.

It may be wrong and ungrateful, but I do wish sometimes that the world
were away--even the good Kenyon-aspect of the world.

And so, once more--may God bless you!

I am wholly yours--

_Tuesday_, remember! And say that you agree.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Saturday.
[Post-mark, January 17, 1846.]

Did my own Ba, in the prosecution of her studies, get to a book on the
forb--no, _un_forbidden shelf--wherein Voltaire pleases to say that
'si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer'? I feel, after
reading these letters,--as ordinarily after seeing you, sweetest, or
hearing from you,--that if _marriage_ did not exist, I should
infallibly _invent_ it. I should say, no words, no _feelings_ even,
do justice to the whole conviction and _religion_ of my soul--and
though they may be suffered to represent some one minute's phase of
it, yet, in their very fulness and passion they do injustice to the
_unrepresented, other minute's_, depth and breadth of love ... which
let my whole life (I would say) be devoted to telling and proving and
exemplifying, if not in one, then in another way--let me have the
plain palpable power of this; the assured time for this ... something
of the satisfaction ... (but for the fantasticalness of the
illustration) ... something like the earnestness of some suitor in
Chancery if he could once get Lord Lyndhurst into a room with him, and
lock the door on them both, and know that his whole story _must_ be
listened to now, and the 'rights of it,'--dearest, the love unspoken
now yo