Your ever affectionate
BA.

I hear that Guizot suffers intensely, and that there are fears lest he may sink.  Not that the complaint is mortal.

[Footnote 133:  Referring to the Pythagorean doctrine of the sanctity of beans.]

To Mr. Westwood Wimpole Street:  April 9, 1845.

Poor Hood!  Ah!  I had feared that the scene was closing on him.  And I am glad that a little of the poor gratitude of the world is laid down at his door just now to muffle to his dying ear the harsher sounds of life.  I forgive much to Sir Robert for the sake of that letter—­though, after all, the minister is not high-hearted, or made of heroic stuff.[134]

I am delighted that you should appreciate Mr. Browning’s high power—­very high, according to my view—­very high, and various.  Yes, ‘Paracelsus’ you should have.  ‘Sordello’ has many fine things in it, but, having been thrown down by many hands as unintelligible, and retained in mine as certainly of the Sphinxine literature, with all its power, I hesitate to be imperious to you in my recommendations of it.  Still, the book is worth being studied—­study is necessary to it, as, indeed, though in a less degree, to all the works of this poet; study is peculiarly necessary to it.  He is a true poet, and a poet, I believe, of a large ‘future in-rus, about to be.’  He is only growing to the height he will attain.

To Mr. Westwood April 1845.

The sin of Sphinxine literature I admit.  Have I not struggled hard to renounce it?  Do I not, day by day?  Do you know that I have been told that I have written things harder to interpret than Browning himself?—­only I cannot, cannot believe it—­he is so very hard.  Tell me honestly (and although I attributed the excessive good nature of the ‘Metropolitan’ criticism to you, I know that you can speak the truth truly!) if anything like the Sphinxineness of Browning, you discover in me; take me as far back as ‘The Seraphim’ volume and answer!  As for Browning, the fault is certainly great, and the disadvantage scarcely calculable, it is so great.  He cuts his language into bits, and one has to join them together, as young children do their dissected maps, in order to make any meaning at all, and to study hard before one can do it.  Not that I grudge the study or the time.  The depth and power of the significance (when it is apprehended) glorifies the puzzle.  With you and me it is so; but with the majority of readers, even of readers of poetry, it is not and cannot be so.

The consequence is, that he is not read except in a peculiar circle very strait and narrow.  He will not die, because the principle of life is in him, but he will not live the warm summer life which is permitted to many of very inferior faculty, because he does not come out into the sun.

Faithfully your friend,
E.B.  BARRETT.

[Footnote 134:  Hood died on May 3, 1845; while on his deathbed he received from Sir Robert Peel the notification that he had conferred on him a pension of 100L a year, with remainder to his wife.]