Was I wrong too, dearest Mr. Boyd, in sending the poems to the ‘Athenaeum’?  Well, I meant to be right.  I fancied that you would rather they were sent; and as your name was not attached, there could be no harm in leaving them to the editor’s disposal.  They are not inserted, as I anticipated.  The religious character was a sufficient objection—­their character of prayer.  Mr. Dilke begged me once, while I was writing for him, to write the name of God and Jesus Christ as little as I could, because those names did not accord with the secular character of the journal!

Ever your affectionate and grateful
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

Tell me how you like the sonnet; but you won’t (I prophesy) like it. 
Keep the ‘Athenaeum.’

[Footnote 71:  The Greek [Greek:  progignoskein], used in Romans viii. 29.]

To H.S.  Boyd December 24, 1842.

My very dear Friend,—­I am afraid that you will infer from my silence that you have affronted me into ill temper by your parody upon my sonnet.  Yet ‘lucus a non lucendo’ were a truer derivation.  I laughed and thanked you over the parody, and put off writing to you until I had the headache, which forced me to put it off again....

May God bless you, my dear Mr. Boyd.  Mr. Savage Landor once said that anybody who could write a parody deserved to be shot; but as he has written one himself since saying so, he has probably changed his mind.  Arabel sends her love.

Ever your affectionate and grateful
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

To H.S.  Boyd January 5, 1842 [1843].

My very dear Friend,—­My surprise was inexpressible at your utterance of the name.  What!  Ossian superior as a poet to Homer!  Mr. Boyd saying so!  Mr. Boyd treading down the neck of Aeschylus while he praises Ossian!  The fact appears to me that anomalous thing among believers—­a miracle without an occasion.

I confess I never, never should have guessed the name; not though I had guessed to Doomsday.  In the first place I do not believe in Ossian, and having partially examined the testimony (for I don’t pretend to any exact learning about it) I consider him as the poetical lay figure upon which Mr. Macpherson dared to cast his personality.  There is a sort of phraseology, nay, an identity of occasional phrases, from the antique—­but that these so-called Ossianic poems were ever discovered and translated as they stand in their present form, I believe in no wise.  As Dr. Johnson wrote to Macpherson, so I would say, ’Mr. Macpherson, I thought you an impostor, and think so still.’