But you are always given to surprise me with abundant kindness—­with supererogatory kindness.  I believe in that, certainly.

I am very very glad that you think me stronger and more perspicuous.  For the perspicuity, I have struggled hard....

Your affectionate and grateful
ELZBETH.

To Mr. Westwood 50 Wimpole Street:  August 22, 1844.

...  Thank you for your welcome letter, so kind in its candour, I angry that you should prefer ‘The Seraphim’!  Angry?  No indeed, indeed, I am grateful for ‘The Seraphim,’ and not exacting for the ‘Drama,’ and all the more because of a secret obstinate persuasion that the ‘Drama’ will have a majority of friends in the end, and perhaps deserve to have them.  Nay, why should I throw perhapses over my own impressions, and be insincere to you who have honoured me by being sincere?  Why should I dissemble my own belief that the ‘Drama’ is worth two or three ’Seraphims’—­my own belief, you know, which is worth nothing, writers knowing themselves so superficially, and having such a natural leaning to their last work.  Still, I may say honestly to you, that I have a far more modest value for ‘The Seraphim’ than your kindness suggests, and that I have seemed to myself to have a clear insight into the fact that that poem was only borne up by the minor poems published with it, from immediate destruction.  There is a want of unity in it which vexes me to think of, and the other faults magnify themselves day by day, more and more, in my eyes.  Therefore it is not that I care more for the ‘Drama,’ but I care less for ’The Seraphim.’  Both poems fall short of my aspiration and desire, but the ‘Drama’ seems to me fuller, freer and stronger, and worth the other three times over.  If it has anything new, I think it must be something new into which I have lived, for certainly I wrote it sincerely and from an inner impulse.  In fact, I never wrote any poem with so much sense of pleasure in the composition, and so rapidly, with continuous flow—­from fifty to a hundred lines a day, and quite in a glow of pleasure and impulse all through.  Still, you have not been used to see me in blank verse, and there may be something in that.  That the poem is full of faults and imperfections I do not in the least doubt.  I have vibrated between exultations and despondencies in the correcting and printing of it, though the composition went smoothly to an end, and I am prepared to receive the bastinado to the critical degree, I do assure you.  The few opinions I have yet had are all to the effect that my advance on the former publication is very great and obvious, but then I am aware that people who thought exactly the contrary would be naturally backward in giving me their opinion....  Indeed, I thank you most earnestly.  Truth and kindness, how rarely do they come together!  I am very grateful to you.  It is curious that ‘Duchess May’ is not a favorite of mine,