And now I am going to tell you what will surprise you, if you do not know it already.  Stormie and Georgie are passing George’s vacation on the Rhine.  You are certainly surprised if you did not know it.  Papa signed and sealed them away on the ground of its being good and refreshing for both of them, and I was even mixed up a little with the diplomacy of it, until I found they were going, and then it was a hard, terrible struggle with me to be calm and see them go.  But that was childish, and when I had heard from them at Ostend I grew more satisfied again, and attained to think less of the fatal influences of my star.  They went away in great spirits, Stormie ‘quite elated,’ to use his own words, and then at the end of the six weeks they must be at home at Sessions; and no possible way of passing the interim could be pleasanter and better and more exhilarating for themselves.  The plan was to go from Ostend by railroad to Brussels and Cologne, then to pass down the Rhine to Switzerland, spend a few days at Geneva, and a week in Paris as they return.  The only fear is that Stormie won’t go to Paris.  We have too many friends there—­a strange obstacle.

Dearest Mrs. Martin, I am doing something more than writing you a letter, I think.

May God bless you all with the most enduring consolations!  Give my love to Mr. Martin, and believe also, both of you, in my sympathy.  I am glad that your poor Fanny should be so supported.  May God bless her and all of you!

Dearest Mrs. Martin’s affectionate
BA.

I am very well for me, and was out in the chair yesterday.

To H.S.  Boyd September 8, 1843.

My very dear Friend,—­I ask you humbly not to fancy me in a passion whenever I happen to be silent.  For a woman to be silent is ominous, I know, but it need not be significant of anything quite so terrible as ill-humour.  And yet it always happens so; if I do not write I am sure to be cross in your opinion.  You set me down directly as ‘hurt,’ which means irritable; or ‘offended,’ which means sulky; your ideal of me having, in fact, ‘its finger in its eye’ all day long.

I, on the contrary, humbled as I was by your hard criticism of my soft rhymes about Flush,[81] waited for Arabel to carry a message for me, begging to know whether you would care at all to see my ’Cry of the Children’[82] before I sent it to you.  But Arabel went without telling me that she was going:  twice she went to St. John’s Wood and made no sign; and now I find myself thrown on my own resources.  Will you see the ’Cry of the Human’[83] or not?  It will not please you, probably.  It wants melody.  The versification is eccentric to the ear, and the subject (the factory miseries) is scarcely an agreeable one to the fancy.  Perhaps altogether you had better not see it, because I know you think me to be deteriorating, and I don’t want you to have further hypothetical evidence of so false an opinion.  Humbled as I am, I say ‘so false an opinion.’  Frankly, if not humbly, I believe myself to have gained power since the time of the publication of the ‘Seraphim,’ and lost nothing except happiness.  Frankly, if not humbly!