Arabel is walking in the Zoological Gardens with the Cliffes—­but I think you will see her before long.

Your affectionate friend,
E.B.  BARRETT.

Don’t let me forget to mention the Essays[47].  You shall have yours—­and Miss Bordman hers—­and the delay has not arisen from either forgetfulness or indifference on my part—­although I never deny that I don’t like giving the Essay to anybody because I don’t like it.  Now that sounds just like ‘a woman’s reason,’ but it isn’t, albeit so reasonable!  I meant to say ‘because I don’t like the ESSAY.’

[Footnote 47:  i.e. copies of the Essay on Mind.]

To H.S.  Boyd 50 Wimpole Street:  Thursday, June 21 [1838].

My dear Friend,—­Notwithstanding this silence so ungrateful in appearance, I thank you at last, and very sincerely, for your kind letter.  It made me laugh, and amused me—­and gratified me besides.  Certainly your ‘quality of mercy is not strained.’

My reason for not writing more immediately is that Arabel has meant, day after day, to go to you, and has had a separate disappointment for every day.  She says now, ‘Indeed, I hope to see Mr. Boyd to-morrow.’  But I say that I will not keep this answer of mine to run the risk of another day’s contingencies, and that it shall go, whether she does or not.

I am better a great deal than I was last week, and have been allowed by Dr. Chambers to come downstairs again, and occupy my old place on the sofa.  My health remains, however, in what I cannot help considering myself, and in what, I believe, Dr. Chambers considers, a very precarious state, and my weakness increases, of course, under the remedies which successive attacks render necessary.  Dr. Chambers deserves my confidence—­and besides the skill with which he has met the different modifications of the complaint, I am grateful to him for a feeling and a sympathy which are certainly rare in such of his profession as have their attention diverted, as his must be, by an immense practice, to fifty objects in a day.  But, notwithstanding all, one breath of the east wind undoes whatever he labours to do.  It is well to look up and remember that in the eternal reality these second causes are no causes at all.

Don’t leave this note about for Arabel to see.  I am anxious not to alarm her, or any one of my family:  and it may please God to make me as well and strong again as ever.  And, indeed, I am twice as well this week as I was last.

Your affectionate friend, dear Mr. Boyd,
E.B.  BARRETT.

I have seen an extract from a private letter of Mr. Chorley, editor of the ’Athenaeum,’[48] which speaks huge praises of my poems.  If he were to say a tithe of them in print, it would be nine times above my expectation!

[Footnote 48:  This is an error.  Mr. Chorley was not editor of the Athenaeum, though he was one of its principal contributors.]