My dearest Mrs. Martin, ...  Did I tell you that Miss Martineau had promised and vowed to me to tell me the whole truth with respect to the poems?  Her letter did not come until a few days ago, and for a full month after the publication; and I was so fearful of the probable sentence that my hands shook as they broke the seal.  But such a pleasant letter!  I have been overjoyed with it.  She says that her ’predominant impression is of the originality’—­very pleasant to hear.  I must not forget, however, to say that she complains of ’want of variety’ in the general effect of the drama, and that she ’likes Lucifer less than anything in the two volumes.’  You see how you have high backers.  Still she talks of ‘immense advances,’ which consoles me again.  In fact, there is scarcely a word to require consolation in her letter, and what did not please me least—­nay, to do myself justice, what put all the rest out of my head for some minutes with joy—­is the account she gives of herself.  For she is better and likely still to be better; she has recovered appetite and sleep, and lost the most threatening symptoms of disease; she has been out for the first time for four years and a half, lying on the grass flat, she says, with my books open beside her day after day. (That does sound vain of me, but I cannot resist the temptation of writing it!) And the means—­the means!  Such means you would never divine!  It is mesmerism.  She is thrown into the magnetic trance twice a day; and the progress is manifest; and the hope for the future clear.  Now, what do you both think?  Consider what a case it is!  No case of a weak-minded woman and a nervous affection; but of the most manlike woman in the three kingdoms—­in the best sense of man—­a woman gifted with admirable fortitude, as well as exercised in high logic, a woman of sensibility and of imagination certainly, but apt to carry her reason unbent wherever she sets her foot; given to utilitarian philosophy and the habit of logical analysis; and suffering under a disease which has induced change of structure and yielded to no tried remedy!  Is it not wonderful, and past expectation?  She suggests that I should try the means—­but I understand that in cases like mine the remedy has done harm instead of good, by over-exciting the system.  But her experience will settle the question of the reality of magnetism with a whole generation of infidels.  For my own part, I have long been a believer, in spite of papa.  Then I have had very kind letters from Mrs. Jameson, the ’Ennuyee’[113] and from Mr. Serjeant Talfourd and some less famous persons.  And a poet with a Welsh name wrote to me yesterday to say that he was writing a poem ’similar to my “Drama of Exile,"’ and begged me to subscribe to it.  Now I tell you all this to make you smile, and because some of it will interest you more gravely.  It will prove to dear unjust Mr. Martin that I do not distrust your sympathy.  How could he think so of me?  I am half vexed that