[Footnote 3:  Ib. 231, 232: 

’Alone of men,
Of miserable men, he took no count.’]

[Footnote 4:  Ib. 235:  ‘But I dared it.’]

[Footnote 5:  Ib. 11:  ‘Leave off his old trick of loving man.’]

[Footnote 6:  Ib. 443, 444: 

’Being fools before,
I made them wise and true in aim of soul.’]

[Footnote 7:  Ib. 250:  ‘Blind hopes.’]

[Footnote 8:  Ib. 251:  ‘A great benefit.’]

[Footnote 9:  Ib. 92:  ‘Behold what I suffer.’]

[Footnote 10:  Ib. 1093:  ‘Dost see how I suffer this wrong?’]

E.B.B. to R.B.

50 Wimpole Street:  March 20, 1845.

Whenever I delay to write to you, dear Mr. Browning, it is not, be sure, that I take my ‘own good time,’ but submit to my own bad time.  It was kind of you to wish to know how I was, and not unkind of me to suspend my answer to your question—­for indeed I have not been very well, nor have had much heart for saying so.  This implacable weather! this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and moon! who can be well in such a wind?  Yet for me, I should not grumble.  There has been nothing very bad the matter with me, as there used to be—­I only grow weaker than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal, in a corner—­and then all this must end!  April is coming.  There will be both a May and a June if we live to see such things, and perhaps, after all, we may.  And as to seeing you besides, I observe that you distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit.  Do you?  You are learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of leading such a secluded life as mine—­notwithstanding all my fine philosophy about social duties and the like—­well—­if you have such knowledge or if you have it not, I cannot say, but I do say that I will indeed see you when the warm weather has revived me a little, and put the earth ’to rights’ again so as to make pleasures of the sort possible.  For if you think that I shall not like to see you, you are wrong, for all your learning.  But I shall be afraid of you at first—­though I am not, in writing thus.  You are Paracelsus, and I am a recluse, with nerves that have been all broken on the rack, and now hang loosely—­quivering at a step and breath.

And what you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts of your life and mine.  You seem to have drunken of the cup of life full, with the sun shining on it.  I have lived only inwardly; or with sorrow, for a strong emotion.  Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than I, who am scarcely to be called young now.  I grew up in the country—­had no social opportunities,