--

To-morrow I will write, and answer more. I am pretty well, and will go
out to-day--to-night. My Act is done, and copied--I will bring it. Do
you see the _Athenaeum_? By Chorley surely--and kind and satisfactory.
I did not expect any notice for a long time--all that about the
'mist,' 'unchanged manner' and the like is politic concession to the
Powers that Be ... because he might tell me that and much more with
his own lips or unprofessional pen, and be thanked into the bargain,
yet he does not. But I fancy he saves me from a rougher hand--the long
extracts answer every purpose--

There is all to say yet--to-morrow!

And ever, ever your own; God bless you!

R.

Admire the clean paper.... I did not notice that I have been writing in
a desk where a candle fell! See the bottoms of the other pages!

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

Sunday Evening.
[Post-mark, January 19, 1846.]

You may have seen, I put off all the weighty business part of the
letter--but I shall do very little with it now. To be sure, a few
words will serve, because you understand me, and believe in _enough_
of me. First, then, I am wholly satisfied, thoroughly made happy in
your assurance. I would build up an infinity of lives, if I could plan
them, one on the other, and all resting on you, on your word--I fully
believe in it,--of my feeling, the gratitude, let there be no attempt
to speak. And for 'waiting'; 'not hurrying',--I leave all with you
henceforth--all you say is most wise, most convincing.

On the saddest part of all,--silence. You understand, and I can
understand through you. Do you know, that I never _used_ to dream
unless indisposed, and rarely then--(of late I dream of you, but quite
of late)--and _those_ nightmare dreams have invariably been of _one_
sort. I stand by (powerless to interpose by a word even) and see the
infliction of tyranny on the unresisting man or beast (generally the
last)--and I wake just in time not to die: let no one try this kind of
experiment on me or mine! Though I have observed that by a felicitous
arrangement, the man with the whip puts it into use with an old horse
commonly. I once knew a fine specimen of the boilingly passionate,
desperately respectable on the Eastern principle that reverences a
madman--and this fellow, whom it was to be death to oppose, (some
bloodvessel was to break)--he, on