Well,—­the comfort is, that the little book was unadvertised and unknown, and that most of the copies (through my entreaty of my father) are shut up in the wardrobe of his bedroom.  If ever I get well I shall show my joy by making a bonfire of them.  In the meantime, the recollection of this sin of mine has been my nightmare and daymare too, and the sin has been the ’Blot on my escutcheon.’  I could look in nobody’s face, with a ’Thou canst not say I did it’—­I know, I did it.  And so I resolved to wash away the transgression, and translate the tragedy over again.  It was an honest straightforward proof of repentance—­was it not? and I have completed it, except the transcription and last polishing.  If AEschylus stands at the foot of my bed now, I shall have a little breath to front him.  I have done my duty by him, not indeed according to his claims, but in proportion to my faculty.  Whether I shall ever publish or not (remember) remains to be considered—­that is a different side of the subject.  If I do, it may be in a magazine—­or—­but this is another ground.  And then, I have in my head to associate with the version, a monodrama of my own,—­not a long poem, but a monologue of AEschylus as he sate a blind exile on the flats of Sicily and recounted the past to his own soul, just before the eagle cracked his great massy skull with a stone.

But my chief intention just now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem—­a poem as completely modern as ‘Geraldine’s Courtship,’ running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, ‘where angels fear to tread’; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it out plainly.  That is my intention.  It is not mature enough yet to be called a plan.  I am waiting for a story, and I won’t take one, because I want to make one, and I like to make my own stories, because then I can take liberties with them in the treatment.

Who told me of your skulls and spiders?  Why, couldn’t I know it without being told?  Did Cornelius Agrippa know nothing without being told?  Mr. Horne never spoke it to my ears—­(I never saw him face to face in my life, although we have corresponded for long and long), and he never wrote it to my eyes.  Perhaps he does not know that I know it.  Well, then! if I were to say that I heard it from you yourself, how would you answer? And it was so. Why, are you not aware that these are the days of mesmerism and clairvoyance?  Are you an infidel?  I have believed in your skulls for the last year, for my part.

And I have some sympathy in your habit of feeling for chairs and tables.  I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place.  This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude.  Other books I used to treat in a like manner—­and to talk to the trees and the flowers, was a natural inclination—­but between me and that time, the cypresses grow thick and dark.