Dear Mr. Martin was so kind as to come and see me as you commanded, and I must tell you that I thought him looking so better than well that I was more than commonly glad to see him.  Give my love to him, and join me in as much metropolitan missionary zeal as will bring you both to London for six months of the year.  Oh, I wish you would come!  Not that it is necessary for you, but that it will be so good for us.

My ivy is growing, and I have green blinds, against which there is an outcry.  They say that I do it out of envy, and for the equalisation of complexions.

Ever your affectionate,
BA.

To Mr. Westwood 50 Wimpole Street:  August 1843.

Dear Mr. Westwood,—­I thank you very much for the kindness of your questioning, and am able to answer that notwithstanding the, as it seems to you, fatal significance of a woman’s silence, I am alive enough to be sincerely grateful for any degree of interest spent upon me.  As to Flush, he should thank you too, but at the present moment he is quite absorbed in finding a cool place in this room to lie down in, having sacrificed his usual favorite place at my feet, his head upon them, oppressed by the torrid necessity of a thermometer above 70.  To Flopsy’s acquaintance he would aspire gladly, only hoping that Flopsy does not ‘delight to bark and bite,’ like dogs in general, because if he does Flush would as soon be acquainted with a cat, he says, for he does not pretend to be a hero.  Poor Flush! ’the bright summer days on which I am ever likely to take him out for a ramble over hill and meadow’ are never likely to shine!  But he follows, or rather leaps into my wheeled chair, and forswears merrier company even now, to be near me.  I am a good deal better, it is right to say, and look forward to a possible prospect of being better still, though I may be shut out from climbing the Brocken otherwise than in a vision.

You will see by the length of the ’Legend’[80] which I send to you (in its only printed form) why I do not send it to you in manuscript.  Keep the book as long as you please.  My new volume is not yet in the press, but I am writing more and more in a view to it, pleased with the thought that some kind hands are already stretched out in welcome and acceptance of what it may become.  Not as idle as I appear, I have also been writing some fugitive verses for American magazines.  This is my confession.  Forgive its tediousness, and believe me thankfully and very sincerely yours,

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

[Footnote 80:  The Lay of the Brown Rosary.]

To Mr. Westwood 50 Wimpole Street:  September 2, 1843.