With our best regards, and sincerest thanks for your kind interest

Believe me, dear Mrs. Martin, most truly yours,

E.B.  BARRETT.

[Footnote 7:  Mrs. Browning usually spells such words as ‘favour,’ ‘honour,’ and the like, without the u, after the fashion which one is accustomed to regard as American.]

To Miss Commeline Hope End:  Monday, [October 1828].

My dear Miss Commeline,—­Thank you for the sympathy and interest which you have extended towards us in our heavy affliction.  Even you cannot know all that we have lost; but God knows, and it has pleased Him to take away the blessing that He gave.  And all must be right since He doeth all!  Indeed we did not foresee this great grief!  If we had we could not have felt it less; but I should not then have been denied the consolation of being with her at the last.

It is idle to speak now of such thoughts, and circumstances have unquestionably been rightly and mercifully ordered.  We are all well and composed—­poor papa supporting us by his own surpassing fortitude.  It is an inexpressible comfort to me to witness his calmness.

I cannot say that we shall not be glad to see you, but the weather is dreary and the distance long:  and if you were to come, we might not be able to meet you and to speak to you with calmness.  In that case you would receive a melancholy impression which I should like to spare you.  Perhaps it would be better for you and less selfish in us, if we were to defer this meeting a little while longer—­but do what you prefer doing!  I can never forget the regard and esteem entertained for you by one whose tenderness and watchfulness I have felt every day and hour since she gave me that life which her loss embitters—­whose memory is more precious to me than any earthly blessing left behind; I have written what is ungrateful, and what I ought not to have written, and what I ought not to feel, and do not always feel, but I did not just then remember that I had so much left to love.

To Mrs. Boyd Hope End:  Saturday morning, [1828-1832].

My dear Mrs. Boyd,—­You were quite wrong in supposing that papa was likely to complain about ‘the number of letters from Malvern;’ and as to my doing so, why did you suggest that?  To fill up a sentence, or to conjure up some kind of limping excuse for idle people?  Among idle people, perhaps you have written me down.  But the reason of my silence was far more reasonable than yours.  I have been engaged in alternately wishing in earnest and wishing in vain for the power of saying when I could go to Malvern—­and in being unwell besides.  For the last week I have not been at all well, and indeed was obliged yesterday to go to bed after breakfast instead of after tea, where I contrived to abstract myself out of a good deal of pain into Lord Byron’s Life by Moore.  To-day this abstraction is not necessary; I am much better; and, indeed, little remains of the indisposition but the vulgar fractions of a cough and cold.  I dare say (and Occyta[8] agrees with me) cold was at the bottom of it all, for I was so very wise as to lie down upon the grass last Monday, when the sun was shining deceitfully, though the snow was staring at me from the hedges, with an expression anything but dog-daysical!