is to appear about the same time, ’under the protection of Mr. Forrest.’  Papa has given me the first two volumes of Wordsworth’s new edition.  The engraving in the first is his own face.  You might think me affected if I told you all I felt in seeing the living face.  His manners are very simple, and his conversation not at all prominent—­if you quite understand what I mean by that.  I do myself, for I saw at the same time Landor—­the brilliant Landor!—­and felt the difference between great genius and eminent talent; All these visions have passed now.  I hear and see nothing, except my doves and the fireplace, and am doing little else than [words torn out] write all day long.  And then people ask me what I mean in [words torn out].  I hope you were among the six who understood or half understood my ’Poet’s Vow’—­that is, if you read it at all.  Uncle Hedley made a long pause at the first part.  But I have been reading, too, Sheridan Knowles’s play of the ‘Wreckers.’  It is full of passion and pathos, and made me shed a great many tears.  How do you get on with the reading society?  Do you see much or anything of Lady Margaret Cocks, from whom I never hear now?  I promised to let her have ‘Ion,’ if I could, before she left Brighton, but the person to whom it was lent did not return it to me in time.  Will you tell her this, if you do see her, and give her my kind regards at the same time?  Dear Bell was so sorry not to have seen you.  If she had, you would have thought her looking very well, notwithstanding the thinness—­perhaps, in some measure, on account of it—­and in eminent spirits.  I have not seen her in such spirits for very, very long.  And there she is, down at Torquay, with the Hedleys and Butlers, making quite a colony of it, and everybody, in each several letter, grumbling in an undertone at the dullness of the place.  What would I give to see the waves once more!  But perhaps if I were there, I should grumble too.  It is a happiness to them to be together, and that, I am sure, they all feel....

Believe me, dearest Mrs. Martin, your affectionate
E.B.B.

Oh that you would call me Ba![29]

[Footnote 29:  Elizabeth Barrett’s ‘pet name’ (see her poem, Poetical Works, ii. 249), given to her as a child by her brother Edward, and used by her family and friends, and by herself in her letters to them, throughout her life.]

To H.S.  Boyd [74 Gloucester Place:] Thursday, December 15, 1836 [postmark].

My dear Mr. Boyd,—...  Two mornings since, I saw in the paper, under the head of literary news, that a change of editorship was taking place in the ‘New Monthly Magazine;’ and that Theodore Hook was to preside in the room of Mr. Hall.  I am so much too modest and too wise to expect the patronage of two editors in succession, that I expect both my poems in a return cover, by every twopenny post.  Besides, what has Theodore Hook to do with Seraphim?  So, I shall leave that poem of mine to your imagination; which won’t be half as troublesome to you as if I asked you to read it; begging you to be assured—­to write it down in your critical rubric—­that it is the very finest composition you ever read, next (of course) to the beloved ‘De Virginitate’ of Gregory Nazianzen.[30]