And what are you doing so late in Herefordshire?  Is dear Mr. Martin too well, and tempting the demons?  I do hope that the next news of you will be of your being about to approach the sun and visit us on the road.  You do not give your wisdom away to your friends, all of it, I hope and trust—­not even to Reynolds.

Tell Mr. Martin that a new great daily newspaper, professing ‘ultraism’ at the right end (meaning his and mine), is making ‘mighty preparation,’ to be called the ’Daily News,’[138] to be edited by Dickens and to combine with the most liberal politics such literature as gives character to the French journals—­the objects being both to help the people and to give a status to men of letters, socially and politically—­great objects which will not be attained, I fear, by any such means.  In the first place, I have misgivings as to Dickens.  He has not, I think, breadth of mind enough for such work, with all his gifts; but we shall see.  An immense capital has been offered and actually advanced.  Be good patriots and order the paper.  And talking of papers, I hope you read in the ‘Morning Chronicle’ Landor’s verses to my friend and England’s poet, Mr. Browning.[139] They have much beauty.

You know that Occy has been ill, and that he is well?  I hope you are not so behindhand in our news as not to know.  For me, I am not yet undone by the winter.  I still sit in my chair and walk about the room.  But the prison doors are shut close, and I could dash myself against them sometimes with a passionate impatience of the need-less captivity.  I feel so intimately and from evidence, how, with air and warmth together in any fair proportion, I should be as well and happy as the rest of the world, that it is intolerable—­well, it is better to sympathise quietly with Lady—­and other energetic runaways, than amuse you with being riotous to no end; and it is best to write one’s own epitaph still more quietly, is it not?...

And oh how lightly I write, and then sigh to think of what different colours my spirits and my paper are.  Do you know what it is to laugh, that you may not cry?  Yet I hold a comfort fast....  Your very affectionate

BA.

[Footnote 138:  The first number of the Daily News appeared on January 2l, 1846, under the editorship of Charles Dickens.]

[Footnote 139:  The well-known lines beginning, ’There is delight in singing.’  They appeared in the Morning Chronicle for November 22, 1845.]

To Mrs. Martin Saturday [February-March 1846].

My dearest Mrs. Martin,—­Indeed it has been tantalising and provoking to have you close by without being able to gather a better advantage from it than the knowledge that you were suffering.  So passes the world and the glory of it.  I have been vexed into a high state of morality, I assure you.  Now that you are gone away I hear from you again; and it does seem to me that almost always it happens