Ever dearest Miss Mitford, you always give me pleasure, so for love’s sake don’t say that you ‘seldom give it,’ and such a magical act as conjuring up for me the sight of a new poem by Alfred Tennyson[196] is unnecessary to prove you a right beneficent enchantress.  Thank you, thank you.  We are not so unworthy of your redundant kindness as to abuse it by a word spoken or sign signified.  You may trust us indeed.  But now you know how free and sincere I am always!  Now tell me.  Apart from the fact of this lyric’s being a fragment of fringe from the great poet’s ‘singing clothes’ (as Leigh Hunt says somewhere), and apart from a certain sweetness and rise and fall in the rhythm, do you really see much for admiration in the poem?  Is it new in, any way?  I admire Tennyson with the most worshipping part of the multitude, as you are aware, but I do not perceive much in this lyric, which strikes me, and Robert also (who goes with me throughout), as quite inferior to the other lyrical snatches in the ‘Princess.’  By the way, if he introduces it in the ‘Princess,’ it will be the only rhymed verse in the work.  Robert thinks that he was thinking of the Rhine echoes in writing it, and not of any heard in his Irish travels.  I hear that Tennyson has taken rooms above Mr. Forster’s in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and is going to try a London life.  So says Mr. Kenyon....  I am writing with an easier mind than when I wrote last, for I was for a little time rendered very unhappy (so unhappy that I couldn’t touch on the subject, which is always the way with me when pain passes a certain point), by hearing accidentally that papa was unwell and looking altered.  My sister persisted in replying to my anxieties that they were unfounded, that I was quite absurd, indeed, in being anxious at all; only people are not generally reformed from their absurdities through being scolded for them.  Now, however, it really appears that the evil has passed.  He left his doctor who had given him lowering medicines, and, coincidently with the leaving, he has recovered looks and health altogether.  Arabel says that I should think he was looking as well as ever, if I saw him, and that appetite and spirits are even redundant.  Thank God....  To have this good news has made me very happy, and I overflow to you accordingly.  Oh, there is pain enough from that quarter, without hearing of his being out of health.  I write to him continually and he does not now return my letters, which is a melancholy something gained.  Now enough of such a subject.

I certainly don’t think that the qualities, half savage and half freethinking, expressed in ‘Jane Eyre’ are likely to suit a model governess or schoolmistress; and it amuses me to consider them in that particular relation.  Your account falls like dew upon the parched curiosity of some of our friends here, to whom (as mere gossip, which did not leave you responsible) I couldn’t resist the temptation of communicating it.  People are so curious—­even