a ‘long vacation pastoral,’ written in loose and more-than-need-be unmusical hexameters, but full of vigour and freshness, and with passages and indeed whole scenes of great beauty and eloquence.  It seems to have been written before the other poems.  Try to get it, if you have not read it already.  I feel certain you will like it and think all the higher of the poet.  Oh, it strikes both Robert and me as being worth twenty of the other little book, with its fragmentary, dislocated, unartistic character.  Arnold’s volume has two good poems in it:  ‘The Sick King of Bokhara’ and ’The Deserted Merman.’  I like them both.  But none of these writers are artists, whatever they may be in future days.  Have you read ‘Shirley,’ and is it as good as ‘Jane Eyre’?  We heard not long since that Mr. Chorley had discovered the author, the ‘Currer Bell.’  A woman, most certainly.  We hear, too, that three large editions of the ‘Princess’ are sold.  So much the happier for England and poetry.

Dearest dear Miss Mitford, mind you write to me, and don’t pay me out in my own silence! You have not been ill, I hope and trust.  Write and tell me every little thing of yourself—­how you are, and whether there is still danger of your being uprooted from Three Mile Cross.  I love and think of you always.  Fancy Flush being taken in the light of a rival by baby!  Oh, baby was quite jealous the other day, and strugggled and kicked to get to me because he saw Flush leaning his pretty head on my lap.  There’s a great strife for privileges between those two.  May God bless you!  My husband’s kind regards always, while I am your most

Affectionate
E.B.B.

To Miss Mitford Florence:  January 9, 1850.

Thank you, ever dearest Miss Mitford, for this welcome letter written on your birthday!  May the fear of small-pox have passed away long before now, and every hope and satisfaction have strengthened and remained!...

May God bless you and give you many happy years, you who can do so much towards the happiness of others.  May I not answer for my own?...

Little Wiedeman began to crawl on Christmas Day.  Before, he used to roll.  We throw things across the floor and he crawls for them like a little dog, on all fours....

He has just caught a cold, which I make more fuss about than I ought, say the wise; but I can’t get resigned to the association of any sort of suffering with his laughing dimpled little body—­it is the blowing about in the wind of such a heap of roses.  So you prefer ‘Shirley’ to ‘Jane Eyre’!  Yet I hear from nobody such an opinion; yet you are very probably right, for ‘Shirley’ may suffer from the natural reaction of the public mind.  What you tell me of Tennyson interests me as everything about him must.  I like to think of him digging gardens—­room for cabbage and all.  At the same time, what he says about the public ‘hating poetry’ is certainly not a word for Tennyson.  Perhaps