For the rest, you always mean what is right and affectionate, and I am not apt to mistake your meanings in this respect.  Be indulgent to me as far as you can, when it appears to you that I sink far below your religious standard, as I am sure I must do oftener than you remind me.  Also, it certainly does appear, to my mind, that we are not, as Christians, called to the exclusive expression of Christian doctrine, either in poetry or prose.  All truth and all beauty and all music belong to God—­He is in all things; and in speaking of all, we speak of Him.  In poetry, which includes all things, ’the diapason closeth full in God.’  I would not lose a note of the lyre, and whatever He has included in His creation I take to be holy subject enough for me.  That I am blamed for this view by many, I know, but I cannot see it otherwise, and when you pay your visit to ‘Peter of York’ and me, and are able to talk everything over, we shall agree tolerably well, I do not doubt.

Ah, what a dream!  What a thought!  Too good even to come true!

I did not think that you would much like the ‘Duchess May;’ but among the profanum vulgus you cannot think how successful it has been.  There was an account in one of the fugitive reviews of a lady falling into hysterics on the perusal of it, although that was nothing to the gush of tears of which there is a tradition, down the Plutonian cheeks of a lawyer unknown, over ‘Bertha in the Lane.’  But these things should not make anybody vain.  It is the story that has power with people, just what you do not care for!

About the reviews you ask a difficult question; but I suppose the best, as reviews, are the ‘Dublin Review,’ ‘Blackwood,’ the ’New Quarterly,’ and the last ‘American,’ I forget the title at this moment, the Whig ‘American,’ not the Democratic.  The most favorable to me are certainly the American unremembered, and the late ‘Metropolitan,’ which last was written, I hear, by Mr. Charles Grant, a voluminous writer, but no poet.  I consider myself singularly happy in my reviews, and to have full reason for gratitude to the profession.

I forgot to say that what the Dublin reviewer did me the honor of considering an Irishism was the expression ‘Do you mind’ in ’Cyprus Wine.’  But he was wrong, because it occurs frequently among our elder English writers, and is as British as London porter.

Now see how you throw me into figurative liquids, by your last Cyprus.  It is the true celestial, this last.  But Arabel pleased me most by bringing back so good an account of you.

Your ever affectionate and grateful
ELIBET.

[Footnote 130:  A monster bell for York Minster, then being exhibited at the Baker Street Bazaar.  Mr. Boyd was an enthusiast on bells and bell ringing.]

To John Kenyan Friday [about January-March 1845].