May this Christmas give you ease and pleasantness, in various ways, my dearest friend!  My Christmas wish for myself is to hear that you are well.  I cannot bear to think of you suffering.  Are the nights better?  May God bless you.  Shall you not think it a great thing if the poems go into a second edition within the twelvemonth?  I am surprised at your not being satisfied.  Consider what poetry is, and that four months have not passed since the publication of mine; and that, where poems have to make their way by force of themselves, and not of name nor of fashion, the first three months cannot present the period of the quickest sale.  That must be for afterwards.  Think of me on Christmas Day, as of one who gratefully loves you.

ELIBET.

A passing reference in a previous letter (above, p. 217) has told of the beginning of another friendship, which was to hold a large place in Miss Barrett’s later life; and the next letter is the first now extant which was written to this new friend, Anna Jameson.  Mrs. Jameson had not at this time written the works on sacred art with which her name is now chiefly associated; but she was already engaged in her long struggle to earn her livelihood by her pen.  Her first work, ‘The Diary of an Ennuyee’ (1826), written before her marriage, had attracted considerable attention.  Since then she had written her ‘Characteristics of Women,’ ’Essays on Shakespeare’s Female Characters,’ ‘Visits and Sketches,’ and a number of compilations of less importance.  Quite recently she had been engaged to write handbooks to the public and private art galleries of London, and had so embarked on the career of art authorship in which her best work was done.

The beginning and end of the following letter are lost.  The subject of it is the long and hostile comment which appeared in the ‘Athenaeum’ for December 28 on Miss Martineau’s letters on mesmerism.

To Mrs. Jameson [End of December 1844.]

...  For the ‘Athenaeum,’ I have always held it as a journal, first—­in the very first rank—­both in ability and integrity; and knowing Mr. Dilke is the ‘Athenaeum,’ I could make no mistake in my estimation of himself.  I have personal reasons for gratitude to both him and his journal, and I have always felt that it was honorable to me to have them.  Also, I do not at all think that because a woman is a woman, she is on that account to be spared the ordinary risks of the arena in literature and philosophy.  I think no such thing.  Logical chivalry would be still more radically debasing to us than any other.  It is not therefore at all as a Harriet Martineau, but as a thinking and feeling Martineau (now don’t laugh), that I hold her to have been hardly used in the late controversy.  And, if you don’t laugh at that, don’t be too grave either, with the thought of your own share and position in the matter; because, as must be obvious to everyone (yourself included), you did everything