that he or
she was likely to mar the prospects of the other. 'If I had spoken to
each, of himself or herself,' he said, 'I _never could have done it_.'

Was not _that_ an ingenious cruelty? The remembrance rose up in me
like a ghost, and made me ask you once to promise what you promised
... (you recollect?) because I could not bear to be stabbed with my
own dagger by the hand of a third person ... _so_! When people have
lucid moments themselves, you know, it is different.

And _shall_ I indeed have a letter to-morrow? Or, not having the
penholder yet, will you....

Goodnight. May God bless you--

Ever and wholly your

BA.

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

[Post-mark, January 23, 1846.]

Now, of all perverse interpretations that ever were and never ought to
have been, commend me to this of Ba's--after I bade her generosity
'understand me,' too!--which meant, 'let her pick out of my disjointed
sentences a general meaning, if she can,--which I very well know their
imperfect utterance would not give to one unsupplied with the key of
my whole heart's-mystery'--and Ba, with the key in her hand, to
pretend and poke feathers and penholders into the key-hole, and
complain that the wards are wrong! So--when the poor scholar, one has
read of, uses not very dissimilar language and argument--who being
threatened with the deprivation of his Virgil learnt the AEneid by
heart and then said 'Take what you can now'!--_that_ Ba calls
'feeling the loss would not be so hard after all'!--_I_ do not, at
least. And if at any future moment I should again be visited--as I
earnestly desire may never be the case--with a sudden consciousness of
the entire inutility of all earthly love (since of _my_ love) to hold
its object back from the decree of God, if such should call it away;
one of those known facts which, for practical good, we treat as
supremely common-place, but which, like those of the uncertainty of
life--the very existence of God, I may say--if they were _not_
common-place, and could they be thoroughly apprehended (except in the
chance minutes which make one grow old, not the mere years)--the
business of the world would cease; but when you find Chaucer's graver
at his work of 'graving smale seles' by the sun's light, you know that
the sun's self could not have been _created_ on that day--do you
'understand' that, Ba? And whe