Ever affectionately yours,
E.B.B.

[Footnote 128:  Evidently a slip of the pen for Douglas Jerrold, whose ‘Shilling Magazine’ began to come out in 1845.]

To Miss Commeline 50 Wimpole Street:  [February-March 1845].

My dear Miss Commeline,—­I do hope that you will allow me to appear to remember you as I never have ceased to do in reality, and at a time when sympathy of friends is generally acceptable, to offer you mine as if I had some right of friendship to do so.  And I am encouraged the more to attempt this because I never shall forget that in the hour of the bitterest agony of my life your brother wrote me a letter which, although I did not read it, I was too ill and distracted, I was yet shown the outside of some months afterwards and enabled to appreciate the sympathy fully.  Such a kindness could not fail to keep alive in me (if the need of keeping alive were!) the memory of the various kindnesses received by me and mine from all your family, nor fail to excite me to desire to impress upon you my remembrance of you and my regard, and the interest with which I hear of your joys and sorrows whenever they are large enough to be seen from such a distance.  Try to believe this of me, dear Miss Commeline, yourself, and let your sisters and your brother believe it also.  If sorrow in its reaction makes us think of our friends, let my name come among the list of yours to you, and with it let the thought come that I am not the coldest and least sincere.  May God bless and comfort you, I say, with a full heart, knowing what afflictions like yours are and must be, but confident besides that ‘we know not what we do’ in weeping for the dearest.  In our sorrow we see the rough side of the stuff; in our joys the smooth; and who shall say that when the taffeta is turned the most silk may not be in the sorrows?  It is true, however, that sorrows are heavy, and that sometimes the conditions of life (which sorrows are) seem hard to us and overcoming, and I believe that much suffering is necessary before we come to learn that the world is a good place to live in and a good place to die in for even the most affectionate and sensitive.

How glad I should be to hear from you some day, when it is not burdensome for you to write at length and fully concerning all of you—­of your sister Maria, and of Laura, and of your brother, and of all your occupations and plans, and whether it enters into your dreams, not to say plans, ever to come to London, or to follow the track of your many neighbours across the seas, perhaps....

For ourselves we have the happiness of seeing our dear papa so well, that I am almost justified in fancying happily that you would not think him altered.  He has perpetual youth like the gods, and I may make affidavit to your brother nevertheless that we never boiled him up to it.  Also his spirits are good and his ‘step on the stair’ so light as to comfort me for not being able to run up and down