ion_
blessed is the evil that fell upon me: and _that_, I can say before
God.

Your BA.

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

Friday.
[Post-mark, February 6, 1846.]

If I said you 'gave me pain' in anything, it was in the only way ever
possible for you, my dearest--by giving _yourself_, in me, pain--being
unjust to your own right and power as I feel them at my heart: and in
that way, I see you will go on to the end, I getting called--in this
very letter--'generous' &c. Well, let me fancy you see very, very deep
into future chances and how I should behave on occasion. I shall
hardly imitate you, I whose sense of the present and its claims of
gratitude already is beyond expression.

All the kind explaining about the opium makes me happier. 'Slowly and
gradually' what may _not_ be done? Then see the bright weather while I
write--lilacs, hawthorn, plum-trees all in bud; elders in leaf,
rose-bushes with great red shoots; thrushes, whitethroats, hedge
sparrows in full song--there can, let us hope, be nothing worse in
store than a sharp wind, a week of it perhaps--and then comes what
shall come--

And Miss Mitford yesterday--and has she fresh fears for you of my evil
influence and Origenic power of 'raying out darkness' like a swart
star? Why, the common sense of the world teaches that there is nothing
people at fault in any faculty of expression are so intolerant of as
the like infirmity in others--whether they are unconscious of, or
indulgent to their own obscurity and fettered organ, the hindrance
from the fettering of their neighbours' is redoubled. A man may think
he is not deaf, or, at least, that you need not be so much annoyed by
his deafness as you profess--but he will be quite aware, to say the
least of it, when another man can't hear _him_; he will certainly not
encourage him to stop his ears. And so with the converse; a writer who
fails to make himself understood, as presumably in my case, may either
believe in his heart that it is _not_ so ... that only as much
attention and previous instructedness as the case calls for, would
quite avail to understand him; or he may open his eyes to the fact and
be trying hard to overcome it: but on which supposition is he led to
confirm another in his unintelligibility? By the proverbial tenderness
of the eye with the mote for the eye with the beam? If that beam were
just su