The poet’s work is no light work.  His wheat will not grow without labour any more than other kinds of wheat, and the sweat of the spirit’s brow is wrung by a yet harder necessity.  And, thinking so, I am inclined to a little regret that you should have hastened your book even for the sake of a sentiment.  Now you will be angry with me....

There are certain difficulties in the way of the critic unprofessional, as I know by experience.  Our most sweet voices are scarcely admissible among the most sour ones of the regular brotherhood....

Harriet Martineau is quite well,’trudging miles together in the snow,’ when the snow was, and in great spirits.  Wordsworth is to be in London in the spring.  Tennyson is dancing the polka and smoking cloud upon cloud at Cheltenham.  Robert Browning is meditating a new poem, and an excursion on the Continent.  Miss Mitford came to spend a day with me some ten days ago; sprinkled, as to the soul, with meadow dews.  Am I at the end of my account?  I think so.

Did you read ‘Blackwood’? and in that case have you had deep delight in an exquisite paper by the Opium-eater, which my heart trembled through from end to end?  What a poet that man is! how he vivifies words, or deepens them, and gives them profound significance....

I understand that poor Hood is supposed to be dying, really dying, at last.  Sydney Smith’s last laugh mixes with his, or nearly so.  But Hood had a deeper heart, in one sense, than Sydney Smith, and is the material of a greater man.

And what are you doing?  Writing—­reading—­or musing of either?  Are you a reviewer-man—­in opposition to the writer?  Once, reviewing was my besetting sin, but now it is only my frailty.  Now that I lie here at the mercy of every reviewer, I save myself by an instinct of self-preservation from that ‘gnawing tooth’ (as Homer and Aeschylus did rightly call it), and spring forward into definite work and thought.  Else, I should perish.  Do you understand that?  If you are a reviewer-man you will, and if not, you must set it down among those mysteries of mine which people talk of as profane.

May God bless you, &c. &c. 
ELIZABETH BARRETT.

[Footnote 88:  In the Athenaeum.]

[Footnote 89:  ‘Crowned and Buried’ (Poetical Works, iii. 9).]

To Mr. Westwood [Undated.]

You know as well as I do how the plague of rhymers, and of bad rhymes, is upon the land, and it was only three weeks ago that, at a ’Literary Institute’ at Brighton, I heard of the Reverend somebody Stoddart gravely proposing ‘Poetry for the Million’ to his audience; he assuring them that ‘poets made a mystery of their art,’ but that in fact nothing except an English grammar, and a rhyming dictionary, and some instruction about counting on the fingers, was necessary in order to make a poet of any man!

This is a fact.  And to this extent has the art, once called divine, been desecrated among the educated classes of our country.