hear from you than see anybody else.  Never you care, dear noble Carlyle, nor you, my own friend Alfred over the sea, nor a troop of true lovers!—­Are not their fates written? there!  Don’t you answer this, please, but, mind it is on record, and now then, with a lighter conscience I shall begin replying to your questions.  But then—­what I have printed gives no knowledge of me—­it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will—­and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion ... that I think—­But I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end—­’R.B. a poem’—­and next, if I speak (and, God knows, feel), as if what you have read were sadly imperfect demonstrations of even mere ability, it is from no absurd vanity, though it might seem so—­these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you; and, no doubt, then, precisely, does the poor drudge that carries the cresset set himself most busily to trim the wick—­for don’t think I want to say I have not worked hard—­(this head of mine knows better)—­but the work has been inside, and not when at stated times I held up my light to you—­and, that there is no self-delusion here, I would prove to you (and nobody else), even by opening this desk I write on, and showing what stuff, in the way of wood, I could make a great bonfire with, if I might only knock the whole clumsy top off my tower!  Of course, every writing body says the same, so I gain nothing by the avowal; but when I remember how I have done what was published, and half done what may never be, I say with some right, you can know but little of me.  Still, I hope sometimes, though phrenologists will have it that I cannot, and am doing better with this darling ’Luria’—­so safe in my head, and a tiny slip of paper I cover with my thumb!

Then you inquire about my ‘sensitiveness to criticism,’ and I shall be glad to tell you exactly, because I have, more than once, taken a course you might else not understand.  I shall live always—­that is for me—­I am living here this 1845, that is for London.  I write from a thorough conviction that it is the duty of me, and with the belief that, after every drawback and shortcoming, I do my best, all things considered—­that is for me, and, so being, the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope, in nowise affect me.  But of course I must, if for merely scientific purposes, know all about this 1845, its ways and doings, and something I do know, as that for a dozen cabbages, if I pleased to grow them in the garden here, I might demand, say, a dozen pence at Covent Garden Market,—­and