East, but regards the whole subject with horror.  This still appears to be Mrs. Jameson’s feeling, as you know it is mine.  Mrs. Jameson came again to this door with a note, and overcoming by kindness, was let in on Saturday last; and sate with me for nearly an hour, and so ran into what my sisters call ’one of my sudden intimacies’ that there was an embrace for a farewell.  Of course she won my affections through my vanity (Mr. Martin will be sure to say, so I hasten to anticipate him) and by exaggerations about my poetry; but really, and although my heart beat itself almost to pieces for fear of seeing her as she walked upstairs, I do think I should have liked her without the flattery.  She is very light—­has the lightest of eyes, the lightest of complexions; no eyebrows, and what looked to me like very pale red hair, and thin lips of no colour at all.  But with all this indecision of exterior the expression is rather acute than soft; and the conversation in its principal characteristics, analytical and examinative; throwing out no thought which is not as clear as glass—­critical, in fact, in somewhat of an austere sense.  I use ‘austere,’ of course, in its intellectual relation, for nothing in the world could be kinder, or more graciously kind, than her whole manner and words were to me.  She is coming again in two or three days, she says.  Yes, and she said of Miss Martineau’s paper in the ‘Athenaeum,’ that she very much doubted the wisdom of publishing it now; and that for the public’s sake, if not for her own, Miss M. should have waited till the excitement of recovered health had a little subsided.  She said of mesmerism altogether that she was inclined to believe it, but had not finally made up her convictions.  She used words so exactly like some I have used myself that I must repeat them, ’that if there was anything in it, there was so much, it became scarcely possible to limit consequences, and the subject grew awful to contemplate.’ ...

On Saturday I had some copies of my American edition, which dazzle the English one; and one or two reviews, transatlantically transcendental in ‘oilie flatterie.’  And I heard yesterday from the English publisher Moxon, and he was ’happy to tell me that the work was selling very well,’ and this without an inquiry on my part.  To say the truth, I was afraid to inquire.  It is good news altogether.  The ’Westminster Review’ won’t be out till next month.

Wordsworth is so excited about the railroad that his wife persuaded him to go away to recover his serenity, but he has returned raging worse than ever.  He says that fifty members of Parliament have promised him their opposition.  He is wrong, I think, but I also consider that if the people remembered his genius and his age, and suspended the obnoxious Act for a few years, they would be right....

May God bless you both.

Most affectionately yours,
BA.

[Footnote 118:  The Athenaum of November 23 contained the first of a series of articles by Miss Martineau, giving her experiences of mesmerism.]