They knew their part; but through the fog
  Their flaming lightning raising;
  They missed my fancy, and instead,
  My choler set a-blazing.

  Quoth I, ’I need not care a pin
  For charge unjust, unsparing;
  Yet oh! for ancient bodkin[26] keen,
  To punish this Pindaring.

  ’Yet oh! that I, a female Jove,
  These fogs sublime might float on,
  Where, eagle-like, my dove might show
  A very [Greek:  ugron noton].[27]

  ’Then lightning should for lightning flash,
  Vexation for vexation,
  And shades of St. John’s Wood should glow
  In awful conflagration.’

  I spoke; when lo! my birds of peace,
  The vengeance disallowing,
  Replied, ‘Coo, coo!’ But keep in mind,
  That cooing is not cowing.[28]

[Footnote 26:  The bodkin seems to be a favourite weapon with ancient dames whose genius was for killing (note by E.B.B.).]

[Footnote 27:  A reference to Pindar, Pyth.i. 9.]

[Footnote 28:  These verses are inclosed with the foregoing letter, as a retort to Mr. Boyd’s parody.]

To Mrs. Martin 74 Gloucester Place:  December 7, 1836.

My dearest Mrs. Martin,—­Indeed I have long felt the need of writing to you (I mean the need to myself), and although so many weeks and even months have passed away in silence, they have not done so in lack of affection and thought.

I had wished very much to have been able to tell you in this letter where we had taken our house, or where we were going to take it.  We remain, however, in our usual state of conscious ignorance, although there is a good deal of talking and walking about a house in Wimpole Street—­which, between ourselves, I am not very anxious to live in, on account of the gloominesses of that street, and of that part of the street, whose walls look so much like Newgate’s turned inside out.  I would rather go on, in my old way, inhabiting castles in the air than that particular house.  Nevertheless, if it is decided upon, I dare say I shall contrive to be satisfied with it, and sleep and wake very much as I should in any other.  It will certainly be a point gained to be settled somewhere, and I do so long to sit in my own armchair—­strange as it will look out of my own room—­and to read from my own books....  For our own particular parts, our healths continue good—­none of us, I think, the worse for fog or wind.  As to wind, we were almost elevated into the prerogative of pigs in the late storm.  We could almost see it, and the feeling it might have been fatal to us.  Bro and I were moralising about shipwrecks, in the dining-room, when down came the chimney through the skylight into the entrance passage.  You may imagine the crashing effect of the bricks bounding from the staircase downwards, breaking the stone steps in the process, in addition to the falling in of twenty-four