The two I do not send are ‘Psyche contemplating Cupid asleep,’ and ‘Psyche and the Eagle.’

And I wait to hear how Polyphemus is to look—­and also Adonis.

The Magazine goes to you with many thanks.  The sonnet is full of force and expression, and I like it as well as ever I did—­better even!

Oh—­such happy news to-day!  The ‘Statira’ is at Plymouth, and my brothers quite well, notwithstanding their hundred days on the sea! It makes me happy.

Yours most affectionately,
BA.

You shall have your ‘Radical’ almost immediately.  I am ashamed. In such haste.

[Footnote 132:  These versions were not published in Mrs. Browning’s lifetime, but were included in the posthumous Last Poems (1862).  They now appear in the Poetical Works, v. 72-83.]

To H.S.  Boyd April 3, 1845.

My very dear Friend,—­I have been intending every day to write to tell you that the Cyprus wine is as nectareous as possible, so fit for the gods, in fact, that I have been forced to leave it off as unfit for me; it made me so feverish.  But I keep it until the sun shall have made me a little less mortal; and in the meantime recognise thankfully both its high qualities and your kind ones.  How delightful it is to have this sense of a summer at hand. Shall I see you this summer, I wonder.  That is a question among my dreams.

By the last American packet I had two letters, one from a poet of Massachusetts, and another from a poetess:  the he, Mr. Lowell, and the she, Mrs. Sigourney.  She says that the sound of my poetry is stirring the ‘deep green forests of the New World;’ which sounds pleasantly, does it not?  And I understand from Mr. Moxon that a new edition will be called for before very long, only not immediately....

Your affectionate and grateful friend,
ELIBET.

Arabel and Mr. Hunter talk of paying you a visit some day.

To Mrs. Martin April 3, 1845.

My dearest Mrs. Martin,—­I wrote to you not many days ago, but I must tell you that our voyagers are safe in Sandgate break in ’an ugly hulk’ (as poor Stormie says despondingly), suffering three or four days of quarantine agony, and that we expect to see them on Monday or Tuesday in the full bloom of their ill humour.  I am happy to think, according to the present symptoms, that the mania for sea voyages is considerably abated.  ‘Nothing could be more miserable,’ exclaims Storm; ’the only comfort of the whole four months is the safety of the beans, tell papa’—­and the safety of the beans is rather a Pythagoraean[133] equivalent for four months’ vexation, though not a bean of them all should have lost in freshness and value!  He could scarcely write, he said, for the chilblains on his hands, and was in utter destitution of shirts and sheets.  Oh!  I have very good hopes that for the future Wimpole Street may be found endurable.